Such torments were evident as desperately I tried to make my peace with each member of the team.
    “You didn’t try anything on. I was so insulted,” Sammy Quick flared.
    “I’m sorry. I’ll try harder next time.”
    “There won’t be a next time, buster.”
    Nor was there, for Sammy had obtained her licence and with it a nifty little sports car.
    “I’ll ride with Sammy,” Janie declared snottily. “Better than struggling along in your bomb.”
    “The first man to touch me, marries me,” Sweet Cherie said adamantly.
    “I’ll always know I was last choice,” Paula Latham wept. “You can’t build a relationship from a base like that.”
    “What was wrong with me?” Maggie Dunne wanted to know.
    “Zed, you are the most hopeless man in the world,” Laura Dunne laughed.
    I think I agreed. But in any case, two more matters conspired against me. One was that we were rotating to earlier games and the need for my transportation services was diminishing. The other was that the day was drawing near when I would leave all this behind and enter the army.
    “My mum says I’m not allowed to go out with soldiers,” Big Eva stated.

—Let’s see now… what else can we do? There are other games. How about… how about… Hump the Hostess? HUNH?? How about that? How about Hump the Hostess? You wanna play that one? You wanna play Hump the Hostess. HUNH? HUNH?
—Calm down, now.
—Or is that for later… mount her like a goddamn dog?
—Hump the Hostess!
—Just shut up… will you?
—You don’t wanna play that now, hunh? You wanna save that game till later? Well, what’ll we play now? We gotta play a game.
—Portrait of a man drowning.
—I am not drowning.
—You told me to shut up
—I’m sorry.
—No you’re not.
—I’m sorry.
—I’ve got it! I’ll tell you what game we’ll play. We’re done with Humiliate the Host…. This round, anyway … we’re done with that… and we don’t want to play Hump the Hostess, yet … not yet… so I know what we’ll play. … We’ll play a round of Get the Guests. How about that? How about a little game of Get the Guests?  
    Edward Albee’s violently abusive play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was first performed in 1962, and admittedly I only saw the great movie version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (and George Seagal and Sandy Dennis). But I soon found the play in book form and read it—it might have been the first time that I ever read a modern play. In any case, all that ferocity and abuse was terrific. A masterpiece everywhichway.
    Forget the fact that I was reasonably sure at the time that there weren’t any wolves in Virginia. Circumstances were conspiring to make me a whole lot less unworldly in a hell of a hurry, in the midst of which this drama had its small role to play. Although several parsecs lay between my parental home and a pair of weary academics playing out their lives in a New England college, still the parallels struck me profoundly. It was on this basis that the marriage of my mother and father prevailed.
    My mother complained about my father’s shortcomings at astonishing length. She complained about other things too, but mostly his remarkable ability to disappoint her satisfied all her needs. He in turn would respond with crude abuse, but never violence. It was this mutual bickering by which they expressed their love and utter devotion to each other. He never failed to provide her with things to complain about, and never failed to bite back when she did so. This, rather than the romantic mutterings of books and movies, was the truest expression of love. They seemed to hate each other, seemed to disapprove of everything the other did.
    In the end, when she slowly became an invalid and began a dying that would take thirty years, he devoted himself to looking after her, eventually gave up work and nursed her full time. And still her protestations at his character flaws continued relentlessly, and it was only when he realised that her end was near that he finally stopped fighting back, and fell silent. Except for some rather awkward, irksome attempts to say nice things to her at her bedside in the hospital.
    Maybe they were nice to each other in private—I don’t know. All I remember was the comfort and certainty of their continual arguments, and I worried only when it stopped. That was when she was too ill to seek out his latest failings, or he was too pained to respond.