Capitol Advances

Sally Quinn's tale of a lusting Washington

SUMMER READING

ARTS FAIR

True story: After the death of columnist Joseph Kraft earlier this year, a friend was helping Mrs. Kraft with the funeral arrangements, calling down a list of the Krafts' out-oftown friends. One lady told the friend that she very much regretted it, but she wouldn't be able to make the memorial service that particular afternoon. I understand, said the caller, who then mentioned that after the service there would be a gathering at Mrs. Graham's house. (That's Katharine Graham, chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company.) There was a pause on the line.

"You know,'' said the woman, "maybe I really should come after all.''

It's pretty cruddy at the top, and as the jacket on Sally Quinn's first novel, Regrets Only (Simon and Schuster), says, this is a world "she knows better than anyone.'' If this is the kind of people she's been getting to know all these years—as a journalist, hostess, and the wife of Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post—it's no wonder her fictional characters are so unspeakable.

This book is not, as Judith Krantz recently said of her own latest creation, "Dostoyevsky." Nor is it Advise & Consent or Heartburn. So what is it—I mean, aside from a one-pound beach cutting board and suntanlotion absorber?

It all has to do with who's getting it, and from whom. This is not art, exactly, but what might be called "cliterature." The action takes place in Washington, but politics is essentially irrelevant, except for background—or headboard. As film critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote of Reds, "[This film] is to communism and the Bolshevik revolution what Hamlet is to Danish foreign policy."

Allison Sterling, heroine-news woman, is on the rebound after being jilted by her man, Desmond Shaw. (Why? Because she scooped him.) He, meanwhile, is off at Mel's (read Mel Krupin's) doing some serious Drinking and Thinking. Des is a lowborn swine from South Boston who has reported his way up from the streets to bureau chief of the powerful Weekly. He's tough—lowborn swine usually are—but the breakup has affected him, too.

In the coital world of Regrets Only, the Washington Monument itself would be suspect

"Maybe [I'll] write a novel or something," he muses. "I guess this is what they call mid-life crisis. It just seems like everything in my life has gone sour. . . .I'm too old for this shit... .1 can't get it up for a story the way I used to." This is not the Des of a hundred pages earlier, who comes back from the bureau at three in the morning asteam with lust for Allison. "Jesus," he says, catching his breath, "I don't know why I'm so horny all of a sudden. I guess nothing turns me on like a good story."

Or the vice president's wife. She persuades the gardener to smuggle her out of the residence in a garbage can so she can meet this First Amendment Lothario for a little lunch a deux and a bit of hankypanky on the shores of the Potomac. Things get even stickier after she becomes First Lady and has to go off the Pill because of mitral-valve prolapse—"the new chic heart condition." (There are some nice touches.) This is some sexy First Lady—even the Brazilian president can't resist making lecherous passes at her on the dance floor of the White House.

Regrets Only is about women in what may be the last man's world. They're repressed or oversexed, but either way not a one of them has a satisfactory sex life with the man she is married to. That tends to make them Alexis-bitchy: a guest arrives "overdressed for Washington, Lorraine was pleased to note.'' Or talk dirty: the First Lady is famous for having been caught saying "Oh, fuck" (rhymes with muck) in front of the press during the campaign. They masturbate and get "the curse" and complain ad upchuckeam about what a drag it is to live in the White House.

The men are nice, too. They are all shits or inept lovers or egomaniacs or bores or rich antiSemites who give bad dinner toasts. (So this is a true story...) The cuckolded president isn't such a bad sort, but he finds oral sex "unappealing," so to hell with him.

By the end, one of Quinn's characters has had it up to his keister. "I'll tell you," he explodes, for once not in bed, "nobody in this city has any morals.'' Perhaps what the gentleman meant to say was that no one in this book has any morals. In the coital world of Regrets Only, the Washington Monument itself would be suspect.

All this doesn't much remind me of the same town I live in and love. But then, the other day the paper ran a story about the poor, disgraced wife of the Canadian ambassador (the one who slapped her social secretary). The reporter asked a society lady who had frequently enjoyed the Canadians' hospitality if she would attend any more of their parties. "I don't know," she replied. "I guess it would depend on who the party was for."

Christopher Buckley