Going Behind Closed Doors in Washington

“What are they doing in California now?” everyone in Washington, D.C., asked me. “They” are those crazy people, those nuts, those sun-dried, brain-damaged, new-aged, left-coastal loonies.

Meanwhile, no one in our nation’s capital bats an eye when GQ, the leading men’s fashion rag, shows one of Washington’s movers and shakers out in a boat with a babe--not in his tailored suit, but in his birthday suit.

Washington is a puritan town. It is a place of deep closets and thinly suppressed desires. It is a town where men in conservative suits have the most outrageous secret sex lives.

A National Public Radio producer there, a native Californian, told me that when he went home, an old buddy from high school asked him, “So what do you do for fun?”

The producer said, “I didn’t know what to say. No one at a party in Washington would ever bring up fun. They’d ask how work was going.”

I was in Washington on a book promotion tour. “So, Alice, tell us about the latest crazy fads in California,” the talk show host asked (as if a blackened redfish never floated ashore on Capitol Hill).

“Alice, what’s with the men out there?” another talk-show host asked me.

“You mean, why are they so good at football and baseball?” I responded. That wasn’t what he wanted.

I wanted to ask him, “What’s with the men here in Washington?” You read so much about what goes on behind closed doors. Why do they all look like Brooks Brothers clones? And so do the women. There’s not a black leather skirt within the Beltway.

To see what evils lurk, I decide to open some doors. I go to Washington’s YMCA health club. There are--count ‘em--seven full floors of state-of-the-art exercise equipment in the dramatic glass-and-brick building. I take an elevator to the jogging tier. We’re not in California now, Toto!

At 7 a.m. on a work day, the joint is jumping. Literally. Like Alice in Wonderland, I walk through and open each door gingerly.

Behind one, rows of people are bicycling to nowhere while reading the papers. Behind another, people are rowing no boat ashore while trying to keep up with the computerized pacer boat. On another floor, behind another door, people are stair-climbing to nowhere and stationary-walking there, too.

There are weight-training rooms of various ability levels. In one, a woman stands alone blowing out her cheeks and pumping up her pects. “Close the door!” she yells at me. I obey. Who am I to mess with the Powerbar-hungry?

Below the rowing deck, beyond the handball, racquetball and squash courts, is an aerobics class, and people are jumping to nowhere in a no-nonsense class. No Spandex. No hair mousse. No smiling. A hard-working workout.

On the jogging tier, I follow a man in a “Miss Porter’s” T-shirt. A sign of liberation? A reminder of the private school payments that get him up this early? He’s in the fast lane to nowhere.

I work my way through more floors of agony and open more doors to the panting, grunting, pumping corridors of Washington power.

Finally, I return to the women’s locker room and try not to stare as a tense young woman hangs up her herringbone coat with the velvet collar. She removes her gray, double-breasted suit, her teal silk blouse, her smart gold jewelry and paisley handkerchief accessories.

She stands there in her purple see-through bra, matching bikinis and garter belt, carefully hanging her clothes so nothing will wrinkle. Next, she locks her Victoria’s Secret lingerie in her locker.

Then she climbs on a purple, glowing table, lies down and pulls a lid over her entire body like a compliant popover in a bun-warmer.

“Is that a tanning machine?” I ask another woman. She nods yes.

Hey, it’s crazy out there on the mid-Atlantic coast!