you're too young & eager to love

After watching Inglourious Basterds, I decided to try my hand at writing some of the characters. Initially, I wanted to try Landa (because, hello, Christoph Waltz, you are phenominal) but ... he was too difficult. I didn't feel up to the challenge.

I focused instead on Archie Hicox and Hugo Stiglitz. Michael Fassbender as Hicox intrigued me; he's charming and clever. He's also very skilled with accents. Stiglitz doesn't say much throughout the film but, as one of the Basterds, he's given more of a background than most of the others.

I didn't achieve much. I need to rewatch the movie. But here are my attempts!

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Hugo Stiglitz, the German. He’s a rough-hewn blonde, built of rigid lines; the man’s a brute, but he sharpens his knife with a skill and precision that suggests patience. It’s something that Hicox does not expect, and so he does not trust it either. This man, he thinks, will be the first to undo them. The least likely to remain stable. The wedge of his jaw, the coiled violence of his strong arms – there’s a simmering instability lurking beneath that silent bearing.

Hicox drapes himself against the doorframe, body slanted, with the cut of his spine suggesting an offhand authority. He is a lieutenant, after all. But Stiglitz glances up and catches him with his eyes – a look that, momentarily, has him pinned like a gasping, paralyzed moth, through the gullet.

When the Basterd draws his blade, without haste, down the strip of sharpening leather, Hicox feels flayed, pink and exposed.

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Stiglitz smokes his crumpled cigarette down to the filter. He speaks English with an accent, but his clever tongue is naturally rough.

Hicox’s English is sweetened by being British. A touch of upperclassman to go along with his scotch and water. Teasing like the point of light at the tip of a sword.

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Stiglitz scalps a Gestapo. Plunging the knife deep into the man’s head, he carves along the curve of his brain. Fragments of blood and bone cling to his hands; there’s blood on his jacket and shirt, on a scrape of skin by his neck.

The lieutenant feels a little sick. Not because he has not seen violence before, but because the German is calloused and quick, unflinching and seemingly uncaring about his role as a butcher. When he looks up, he salutes Hicox with a thin, mocking smile.

“You really are quite skilled with that.” The knife, he adds to himself, but his eyes motion towards the blade.

Stiglitz murmurs something that might sound like practice, but he likes how the other man sounds impressed.

Later, they slosh back a few mouthfuls of scotch together.

2 postings in one day! I blame my muse of a wife.

Experimenting with a new character. A wife who, with her husband, has to find a surrogate in order to have a child. The surrogate moves in with them. Because, why not? Added interactions!

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This is it, she thinks, an invasion of her space.
(She tries chiding herself later while soaking in overly hot bathwater.)

Her hair is long and very straight, cut bluntly near her shoulders, and she wears glasses that look more suited for fashion than necessity. This is how she presents herself, standing in the foyer with her hand on her husband’s arm. He is tall, broad - almost too handsome with his demigod good looks. He is also overzealous, his grin stretched wide across his mouth, his body brimming with excited heat. (Claudette half expects to look down and see the outline of his cock, semi-hard, against his jeans.) She curls her fingers, coral polished nails digging into the muscle, and the corner of his lips quiver with annoyance but, to her approval, understanding.

The surrogate is pretty. She thinks her husband might wrap her in a bear hug, he’s just so overjoyed at this monumental event, but instead he shakes her hand warmly then goes to fetch the bags.

Claudette smiles; it isn’t necessarily warm. To her credit, she shows the woman the house and offers sweet tea too often.

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The house is a monument to their relationship.

They are beautiful in the way that propriety should be. Harkening Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, only with less southern heat and alcohol. They are wedding smiles caught behind glass picture frames, linked hands during evening walks, the soft laughter of intimacy during the night.

But there is no child. There cannot be one, the doctor tells them, his medical eyes pointedly directed at Claudette in her camel colored sweater and simple, clean, silver jewelry.

There is, however, an infidelity. A blazing stain on her wedding sheets. (She changes the color to soothing lavender afterwards.) They speak around it instead of discussing it, and she passes her cool hand across her stomach with blaming bitterness.

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The surrogate, Romy, helps to decorate the nursery. This is called nesting, and it supposed to be a bonding experience. The first of many small attempts to help a mother attach to a child that does not grow inside of her, but Hugh chooses colors that she finds garish and insulting.

There is nothing private about their interactions – Romy’s easy laughter at his obvious excitement, the way he eyes her stomach daily, waiting for the swelling to occur, the almost constant appreciation he has of her – but Claudette feels left separate and apart. More than that, she feels uninterested. When she tries to paint decorative trim near the window, tiny blue and yellow French swirl patterns, her fingers are not skilled enough and the lines brush together. They are spidery and clumsy.

In the end, Hugh decides to paint over them.

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She drinks Merlot. A tiny bit too much, though Hugh brushes the subject softly.

She keeps an eye out for the day marked in red on the kitchen calendar – her small handwriting neatly noting when her husband must leave for business. She’ll drive him to the airport, despite the city traffic, and kiss him with a tenderness that almost hurts her heart. He has a tendency to be overly doting, occasionally, when he has to leave, and he strokes her cheek and presses his thumb against her lipstick colored mouth. As though he thinks she might be about to tell him that leaving could hurt worse.

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