Vanished in the Dunes (2 page)

Their marriage has been in a downward spiral for some time now. Sara was originally sympathetic to his potential legal problem, and she freely enjoys the revenue derived from his earlier success. More recently, she seems disinterested in his legal concerns and focuses more on his diminishing interest in sex. She hasn't bought into the explanation that the stress of his legal problems coupled with his job loss has upset his libido despite such confirmation by a urologist. At first, he hoped that she would come to understand, but as he retreated further into his world at the beach she had another theory.

It came to a head six weeks ago on a Sunday at the beach house as she was getting ready to return to New York. There would soon
be a ride back with a neighbor. She stood across from him in the living room her legs straddling the small weekend bag stuffed with the laptop and the usual selection of work files she always brought with her.

“I need to know if you're seeing someone else. Someone local. Is that why you always want to be here? Do you want someone younger? Someone available on a moment's notice?”

“There's no one else. I swear.”

She started to walk down the steps, then stopped halfway down, turned, and faced him.

“I just don't know if I can believe you.”

And she hasn't spent a night at the beach since that Sunday. Oh, he'd spent time in the city since then, but it wasn't the same as it had once been. When he was in town, she was so distant as to make him feel isolated in his own apartment even though he thought spending more time in the city would defuse her accusations.

Then there was this morning's surprise note that she might make it out to the beach for the night and take a bus back later the next day. After reading today's newspaper story, a part of him would prefer if she didn't come today. Still, if it means she wants to be with him, then it'll be well worth it. Maybe today will be different. If she does come out we'll do something special. Something to pull him out of his funk over the foreign bribery mess and maybe begin to repair things between them. A quiet dinner tomorrow in the garden room at the American Hotel would work. He makes a mental note to book a table and sips from the small complimentary water bottle the attendant distributed during the first minutes of the trip.

He looks up as the bus turns off the expressway at the Manorville exit. He notices that the dark cloud has turned even blacker and continues to follow their route, as if waiting to be united with the bus at some distant point. Posner shivers slightly, then aggressively turns
pages as he searches for the crossword puzzle. Indiscriminate words hold no fear for him. He works on the puzzle intermittently as the bus makes its ritual stops in Southampton and other small villages.

“Excuse me, but is the East Hampton beach near the bus stop?”

The voice comes from just behind him. He turns. The pink-and-white dress has moved from some seat in the back and now stands in the aisle. One arm stretches above to hold the railing under the storage bins. The pose is almost erotic in its effect. The pitch of the voice is low and throaty. He detects some accent, something European. Somehow he thinks of rushing water. He gathers himself into speech.

“It's not too close. You can get a taxi to take you there, but the weather doesn't look too promising for the beach.”

He might have said that he wasn't sure, or something equally evasive, but the simple act of engaging this woman in conversation, has an immediate effect on his anguish, which he feels slipping away. He has an almost unnatural motivation to keep the conversation alive.

“How come you're out here on such a cool day if you want to see the beach?” he asks.

The bus nears the turn to East Hampton; there are but a few minutes left before it stops.

“I just wanted to see the beach. Ever since I'm in New York, I've heard how beautiful the beaches are. I have the day off, so I thought I'd have a look.”

“A day off from what?” he asks, as he wonders about his first assessment. The woman raises both arms and smoothes her hair, as if posing. The motion propels her chest forward. He feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up, as if he's just entered a cold room.

“I'm a resident in psychiatry at Mt. Sinai. Wednesday is my day off,” she answers in the matter-of-fact way people describe the most mundane things, like what car they own, or the movie they saw the past weekend.

This simple disclosure catches Posner unawares. So much for initial judgments, he thinks, but he recovers quickly enough to ask about her accent.

“
Ach
. That is German. I grew up in Austria, in Vienna. That's after my parents left Iran just before the shah and his family did.”

Everything is clear now to Posner, the facial coloring and the accent all come together. And a doctor, no less. She must have sensed his surprise. She's probably seen it many times, but before he can say a word the bus begins to slow as it approaches the East Hampton stop. The empty driveway of the Palm Restaurant lies to the right. She stands and moves a step closer up the aisle and stops next to where he sits. The movement causes her to sway slightly and her hip brushes his shoulder. She seizes his eyes with her own, a pair of wide black bullets that bore through him, a discomfort he cannot evade.

“Do you get off here?” she asks, still swaying slightly as the bus slows. “Perhaps you can drop me at the beach.”

“Sorry, but I go on till Amagansett,” he answers. “Next stop.”

She nods slightly. “Too bad.” Her eyes remain locked on his.

The bus stops. “Well, thank you anyway,” she says, and offers her hand.

It all seems very formal to Posner. Very European. Her grip is warm, and he senses her fingers linger across his palm far longer than normal. But what is normal?

“Enjoy,” he says and releases her hand. He watches her walk down the aisle, briefly wonders why she was flirting with him, and smiles at the idea. The woman is probably only slightly more than half his age. Whatever it is, he feels a physical quiver where he has become used to near dormancy.

As the bus pulls away, he catches a flicker of pink and white against green foliage as she heads in the direction of the village shops. In a moment the bus escapes the area and he awaits the five-minute drive into Amagansett. The woman diverts his attention from his
legal issues for a few minutes, but as soon as she leaves, his angst resurfaces with even greater intensity. He concentrates on a relaxation exercise where he breathes in and out slowly. It always seems to help.

A few minutes later, the bus slows and the gasp from the air brakes shakes him back to reality. He is the last passenger. He begins the short walk to the parking lot behind the library.

He finds the car, a new blue Lexus, hiding where he'd left it two days ago. Sara bought the car for cash from her own account the previous October. Since he lost his job and his severance has nearly disappeared, she now pays for everything. The Lexus was her choice although he would have preferred a more modest car, a hybrid, but he had no input.

“She's the one who's ringing the cash register now,” her colleague Howard had said at the reception he attended a few months before that celebrated her law firm's twenty-fifth anniversary. Howard had been more than a little drunk when he spoke, but everything he said was true, however impolitic.

He sits motionless in the front seat, staring at the empty stretch of field beyond the parking lot. Tiny green shoots dot the earth. Regeneration, he thinks, but not for him. He is essentially unemployable within the international trading community, although there has been no publicized accounting of his activities. There is, however, a unique form of radar that links all elements in the relatively small commercial sector that deals in commodities. For millennia, the stock in trade for those whose survival depended on sound trading was clear and accurate information. Adverse weather, strikes, revolutions, mechanical failures all shaped supply and demand. Posner himself had once singularly procured information about the unanticipated early arrival of a large cargo of aluminum metal into Rotterdam at a time of great shortage. The cargo would replenish depleted stocks and prices would decline, but not before Posner sold
considerable quantities short. He had acquired the correct information at the cost of a modest bribe to the ship owner's agent for daily updates on its arrival expectations.

But now he is little more than damaged goods. The same intelligence network that affords traders the opportunity to grasp early options now exposes the potential dangers in employing someone who might lead authorities to their door.

He has considered other employment options, but Wall Street is no longer one of them, the rejections were too long to list. He had always wanted to be an architect, ever since his parents took him to an Art Deco museum show. In high school he would endlessly design buildings, based on the ideas in that show. He wanted to build houses with new, spacious interiors. He wanted to renovate every aging brownstone in New York into airy, sun-filled homes. He wanted to do all this and his father, Stephen Posner, grandson of immigrant refugees from the Kishinev pogrom, agreed with enthusiasm.

“He will help build a better America,” his father said a few months before his first year of Cornell's five-year architecture program. “We will find the money.”

And somehow the money was there, at least for his first two years. Then there was his father's heart attack. He sat in a class that discussed how to measure stresses on structures when an aide brought a message to the teacher who interrupted the lecture to call him forward. His father was ill and his family wanted him to go home as soon as possible. His father had already died, but he wouldn't know that for seven hours. That's how long it took to take the bus from Ithaca to New York City, and then the subway ride and bus trip to the Bayside, Queens, house that was the only home he'd ever known. He never returned to Cornell. There was no money, and they needed money. His mother's brother had a Wall Street job and arranged for an interview with a firm that needed a trainee for their commodities group. He got the job and never left the industry. The only remnant
of his architectural interest was a framed preliminary sketch he made years before of the house he now lives in.

He inserts the key into the ignition. The car still smells of new leather. Even if this is the car Sara wanted, he has the satisfaction of driving it to the home he chose and paid for out of his own earnings nearly twenty years ago, even before he and Sara had ever met. He takes considerable pleasure in this recollection.

The house is modern and sits on nearly half an acre of high dune only a block from the beach. A gray crushed-stone driveway climbs from the street amidst thick sand pines. A red quarry tiled entrance floor leads to four bedrooms and two baths, and a steep flight of wooden stairs just beyond the front door provides access to the main living quarters, a master bedroom suite, kitchen, and open living and dining areas. The exterior upstairs walls are interspersed with large floor-to-ceiling windows. There are wraparound decks and dramatic views of the ocean.

There is also a desk and chair from which he enjoys these views, a place where he now writes a history of his indiscretions. He often wonders if that is the correct word, but the meaning is clear, if only to him. He writes about his days in Iran, Venezuela, Chile, and Japan, and the bribes he's paid to obtain contracts. He remembers the envelopes he's passed over cocktails, the nods and winks that preceded every transaction, each the understated language of modern business, the lingua franca of twentieth-century corruption, although the practice has been entrenched for thousands of years.

“What will it take to make this business work?” he asked the ultimate buyer or seller, in words that have been repeated for centuries. Nothing has changed, except that penalties for such activities now exist. So he writes about what he has done. He does not think of this manuscript as a form of memoir. It is more or less a confessional of sorts. The process of writing eases his guilt, although the painful risk of discovery remains. His prose justifies his innocence. He only
obeyed his senior managers. He didn't realize such activities were illegal. His justifications rise to absurd heights. His efforts helped an underdeveloped country obtain needed foreign currency, or have, in the national interest, profited American companies at the expense of overseas competitors.

He was fired shortly after the first Justice Department query letter arrived two years ago. With little else to do, he began writing. Writing the truth was all he has left. The company CEO remains. Yearly Christmas cards arrive, a smiling family portrait fronting a fireplace. He wonders why the CEO seems so secure while he is tormented. But he was the fall guy. The CEO's smile says: “Tough shit, Posner.”

A car horn returns Posner to the present. He moves out of the lot past the library until a delivery truck blocks the exit. He wants to get home and return to his writing, but he realizes he should pick up a few food items for Sara. If she comes as promised, she'll arrive too late for anything more than something light to eat. The delay lasts a few minutes and his mind wanders. When the traffic finally moves, he swings his car to the right toward East Hampton.

He stops at the Suffolk County National Bank's drive-by ATM. The last CD from his working days has just matured. It's money he's earned and saved before he lost his job. He withdraws five hundred dollars. Now he won't need to touch the joint account for some time and a renewed feeling of even temporary financial independence quickens his pulse.

He pushes the Lexus to maximum legal speed until he enters a slow lane of traffic. He finally nears the corner of Newtown Lane and Main Street, the village's only major commercial intersection, and is surprised to see two empty spots in front of Citarella's, the newest upscale food emporium. He executes a U-turn at the Chase Bank and
effortlessly swings the Lexus eastbound. At that moment he almost wants to thank Sara for the car's mobility. He approaches the corner where the Citarella store sits, but in less than a minute the spots are already taken, so he pulls into the rear lot.