Twenty years ago, I would have done it, probably in the story's first few weeks--a lock, really, a cinch, given all the elements of the story that are ripe for the taking. The amorous Congressman; the enticement of a tale about another Washington intern; sex in the capital city; sex and politics; sex. Or go a little deeper: a story about the impenetrable nature of public lives or of private lives suddenly blasted with publicity and a sidelight into the missing-persons cases that do not draw national attention--a moral lament about that.
Or go historical and write about all the missing persons who ever teased the world's imaginations--Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, Ambrose Bierce, Agatha Christie, Aimee Semple McPherson and her faked kidnapping, Sherwood Anderson and his faked amnesia, Dr. Livingston--I would have presumed.
Or go mystical, play with language and discuss what it means to be missing in America. What or who is missed? Is a missing person like a missed appointment, a missed date? How is it possible to be missing in the land of multiple sources of identification? (Here, note that Gary Condit is said to have told Chandra Levy not to carry any means of identification with her when they had their trysts.) Who and what does Levy miss?
I would have done all or some of that 20 years ago, but I won't do it now--though I realize that by using this conceit to set up my reason, I will appear to be entering the story by the back door and to be writing about it as I don't. Bear with me?
The angle taken most easily, of course, involves the down-and-dirty possibilities of the case--the lurid interest in Condit's apartment house, shown frequently on TV and looking like the soulless building where Isabella Rossellini was kept in Blue Velvet; the images of secret lovemaking on dank and silent Washington summer evenings; new old girlfriends turning up on a weekly basis, talking of being told not to talk. One could swim down into this stuff or pretend to sail above it (as this paragraph somewhat does) and swim while sailing.
The reason that I won't do it is not just because I don't have anything to say that would be any more interesting than what anyone else might say (I don't) or because I take the purist's stand and wish to withhold judgment until the facts are in. It is simply because I have seen enough of sadness in the news to tell me that--unless Chandra turns up alive--this is the story of something very bad happening to a young woman, and, for the moment, I do not know what more there is to say about that.
Something odd and transforming generally happens to the public when presented with a story like Levy's. Most people are decent natured when they learn of a terrible event, and their sympathetic attention flies to the person in distress or peril. But open the story to one of sweaty nights between the sheets or to the possibility of murder by a public figure, and the initial rush of sympathy is closed off as if by a valve. Enter, then, the cable-TV experts in somber fantasizing and rampant "scenarios," and a story that caused you to gulp now makes you salivate.