So he decided upon an alternate hobby. Cars. There was a mechanic’s facility across the Severn River where midshipmen could rent a space with a lift and borrow tools, so they could work on their cars. With a thousand dollars Lewinsky had managed to save, he’d bought an old Mustang. A 1970 Boss, with the original, now faded, radical orange paint job with black stripes. The car was somewhat sound, having spent decades in a barn, but nothing mechanical or electrical worked, and it would all have to be replaced. The entire power train had to go. He’d scrapped the 351 Cleveland V8 and saved for a big block V8 crate engine with a manual five speed performance transmission, spending his weekends putting the engine into the car and solving the thousands of problems of an engine transplant in a car that old.
He’d worked on the car for his entire time at Annapolis, his father even deciding to pay the rent on the space and pay for the new parts, apparently pleased at the results of this auto-restoration-therapy. By the time Lewinsky was a first class midshipman, a senior, he was a double major in mathematics and physics, a nominee for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and the proud owner of a newly painted orange muscle car that was the envy of his entire company. And the funny thing about that car was that it made people talk to him, without him having to do anything. He’d drive it around Annapolis that summer before first class year, the exhaust roaring, the engine purring, the wheels a gleaming polished chrome, the tires wide and black and shiny, the slick orange paint job so outrageous that seemingly everyone at the Academy knew it belonged to him. People came up to him when he’d fill it with gas or when he parked, talking about their own project cars or simply admiring this blast from the past. People of every sort flocked to the car, old duffers who remembered when that was a car they’d lusted over in high school, young teenagers asking how he’d restored it and was it difficult, and then the groupie girls, the women who loved cars, and so it happened that he met Anne, who had fallen in love with the Mustang first, Lewinsky second.
And from that point on, all the worries and anxieties seemed to fade into the past. Lewinsky went on to Oxford, did more work in physics, found it almost unbearably difficult, but managed to squeak by and get a master’s degree. Then on to the nuclear power training pipeline, nuclear prototype, submarine school, and his first submarine, the Norfolk-based USS Montpelier, SSN-765. Three years there, qualifying in submarines, then shore duty teaching physics at Annapolis for two years, then on to the Vermont.
All those years, he’d restored cars, selling the Mustang for a wrecked 1963 split-window Corvette, which had been in such bad shape it had to be lifted from its collapsing garage with a crane. Two years later, it looked as new as when it had rolled off the factory floor. Lewinsky had used the amazing profits from the Mustang to restore the Corvette’s original parts rather than replacing everything as he had with the Mustang. Corvette enthusiasts talked about “the numbers matching” as if putting a new crate engine into a Corvette were some kind of mortal sin.
When he’d sold the Corvette, it had fetched an eye-popping six-figure amount. It left him enough to buy the Ferrari Testarossa, Italian for “redhead.”
So there were cars in his life, but no women. That girl Anne at Annapolis had been kind to him, and they’d dated until he’d had to leave for Oxford, and as people told him to expect, the distance eventually strangled the relationship. She’d found someone else and had gotten married and by now was working on having her second child. As for Lewinsky, while he’d conquered much of his anxiety, he was just too shy to ask a woman out or approach someone at a bar. He began to imagine he would die alone.
He’d steamed on alone until he’d reported back to Norfolk when his instructor duty at Annapolis concluded, and it was time to take on the hardest job in the Navy, engineer of a nuclear submarine. He smiled to himself — his old worrywart self could never have done this job. He’d driven the Testarossa to a beachside café in Virginia Beach one sunny Saturday, thinking he’d have a beer and a sandwich outside on the beachfront deck, enjoy the sunshine, maybe go for a run later in the afternoon when it would get cooler. He’d just bitten into a club sandwich when a stunning redheaded woman walked up to him wearing a short skirt, tube top and running sneakers. She was slender, with curvaceous hips, tiny waist, and what had to be double-D-cup breasts that pointed outward like the front bumper of a ’57 Cadillac. She was practically falling out of her shirt. Her skin was smooth and tanned, her body was toned, and she had a long graceful neck, a lovely face with pouty red lips, strong cheekbones, an upturned nose, wide brown romantic eyes with long lashes, her face framed by long, straight, shining naturally red hair that came down to her nipples, and it had so much sleek body that she could have been in a shampoo commercial.
Without a word, she pulled back the seat opposite Lewinski’s and sat down, smiling at him slightly. She motioned the waitress over. “Old fashioned, neat, please,” she said in a slight Southern accent, her voice silky and feminine, “and ask if they could use Angel’s Envy bourbon. And then I’ll have what he’s having.”
He stared at her, his mouth half open, then he remembered to chew his food and swallow, and it had almost gone down the wrong way.
“Um,” he said. “Hello.” His voice had been an adolescent squeak. He coughed, cleared his throat, and tried to make his voice deep again. And make it sound like every day of the week a gorgeous, hot model sat down at his table, uninvited. “I’m Mario. Mario Lewinsky. Who are you?”
“Hello, Mario. I’m Redhead.”
He found himself smiling at her, despite the strangeness of the situation. Was she a hooker, sent by the officers of the Vermont to tease him and make fun of his reaction? He’d only just met them at the hail-and-farewell party at the executive officer’s house, and they were definitely a rowdy crew of pranksters. It would be just like Man Mountain Squirt Gun Vevera to arrange to have a hooker approach him at a Saturday lunch.
“No, what’s your real name?” Using ‘Redhead’ as her name was a stripper thing, he thought, the way all strippers seemed to be ‘Amber’ or ‘Tiffany’ or ‘Crystal.’
She smiled with a row of absolutely perfect white teeth. Which meant there was no way this was legit, he thought.
“I quit using it. You’ll laugh.” The tiniest micro-expression of sadness crossed that gorgeous face.
He smiled back at her. “Listen, try going through life with a name like Mario Elvis Lewinsky. It can’t be worse than that.”
She looked down at the table for a second, then whispered something he couldn’t hear. He cupped his hand to his ear. “Eh?” he said, imitating a hearing-impaired octogenarian.
“Please don’t laugh. It’s Bamanda. Like Amanda, but with a big BAM at the start. My father’s idea of a cool name, with him going through life bragging about how he invented my name. I would have used my middle name, but he put his fingerprints on that too. I don’t tell anyone what that name is. Since middle school, I just told people my name was ‘Redhead,’ and they started going along with it. I make sure the color stays the way it looked when I was young. These days, decades down the road, I have help from a flamboyant stylist name Jorge. So yes, it’s my natural color, but yes, I dye the fuck out of it. And does the carpet match the drapes? There is no carpet. Hardwood floors, you might say.”