Coastal City Name Generator

The story

Leni selected the hat on the principle that nobody would recognize a woman wearing something so unlike Leni. It had a low gray crown, a stiff brim, and a feather that appeared to have given up. At fifty-eight she knew how to stand before six hundred listeners and make a pause seem intentional. She did not know how to enter the salt baths and say that she had never learned to swim. The hat seemed a reasonable first answer to this difficulty. She put her bath bag beneath her best traveling cloak, which was a less convincing part of the disguise.

Thalwick had put her face on a festival poster beside the canal, although she was leaving for a long inland tour in three days. On the poster she appeared to understand all possible arrangements of air. Under it, she asked the launch keeper for a private trip to the White Steps baths. He explained that this craft would put her down at the upper quay at the present low water. The lower landing needed more depth. Leni heard private, which was the important word. She paid before a woman behind her could finish saying that she looked familiar.

The launch moved through the city's working canals between deliveries of flour, paper and people who had not paid to be mysterious. As the water fell away from its usual stone line, a narrow walking passage beneath a crossing became visible. A man carrying a rolled bath towel went through it. Leni pointed him out. The keeper said yes, walkers could use that low-water passage; his deep-bottomed launch could not use the same space. She looked at the generous boat cushion she had purchased for the journey. She would have preferred the two kinds of convenience to be interchangeable.

He stopped at the upper quay exactly as promised. The celebrated lower steps were visible beyond the new promenade works, but not reachable by her chosen boat. ‘Could you come a little closer?’ Leni asked, lowering her voice as though water depth were a matter best discussed discreetly. The keeper indicated the exposed sill. ‘Closer on foot.’ Other passengers at the public landing were already walking toward a sign for the baths. Leni got out with her bag, her unhelpful hat, and the full knowledge that she would have to carry herself the rest of the way.

She had sung at the White Steps twenty years earlier. An artist had painted that performance, arranging the city behind her in a flattering curve. Copies hung in hotels. In them the steps existed chiefly to lead upward toward Leni. In the present city, towels were drying on a rail, a worker was moving a hamper of clean bath wraps, and a small temporary gate opened beside the construction barrier. The promenade project was being built in sections around the bathing route. A clear board directed daily users through the side approach. Nothing on the board invited a famous visitor to wait at the picturesque top rail.

Leni waited there anyway for half a minute. It was possible, she thought, that someone would come to collect the booked learners. The hamper worker came past and asked whether she was looking for the lesson entrance. She said she was merely examining the works, then realized that this was an excellent way to miss the lesson entirely. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The entrance.’ He pointed toward the board she had already read. She followed the ordinary users through the temporary approach. The old steps were neither an abandoned monument nor a stage reserved for memories of her own performance. People had errands down them.

The instructor was checking a short list beside the enclosed teaching baths. There were four adult beginners already waiting. Leni's booking was marked with an initial, L. The instructor asked whether that was her. She said yes in the small voice she had practiced for the purpose. It sounded exactly like the opening of a song everyone knew. One of the waiting women turned. It was Resta, who had sung in a festival chorus until Leni once advised her that her greatest gift was knowing when not to be heard. Leni remembered the sentence with an unpleasant accuracy she rarely brought to old reviews.

Resta said, ‘Oh.’ She did not smile. Leni considered explaining that the remark had been about a particular arrangement, which was true but less useful than she wanted. Instead she said that she remembered being unkind. Resta said she remembered it too. Then she turned back to the instructor, keeping her own booked place. There was no obligation to help a famous woman feel ordinary by treating an old insult as a charming misunderstanding. Leni wished she could sing a difficult passage at them. A difficult passage would have been a much more comfortable kind of exposure.

‘Have you had lessons before?’ the instructor asked. This was the last moment in which Leni could have described herself as returning to a neglected skill. She could almost see the pleasant person that answer would create: accomplished, busy, naturally confident, merely out of practice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not any.’ The instructor marked the list and showed her where the beginners' group was starting. No fanfare announced her courage. She had missed the opening minutes while waiting at the scenic rail, and another learner briefly explained the ordinary arrangements she had missed. Leni thanked him. Her hat remained ridiculous even on its peg.

Inside the enclosed fictional lesson space, with the instructor present, she attempted the first small activity the group had already begun. The story of that minute would later be difficult to tell without improving it. She was awkward. Her voice escaped in a noise she would never have allowed into a rehearsal hall. Resta did not laugh, but neither did she pretend not to hear. Leni tried again within the lesson's ordinary supervision. The water did not recognize her festival poster. Nothing in her long practice of breath and sound gave her a second skill by courtesy.

When she managed the small supervised attempt, the instructor acknowledged that attempt and moved on. He did not say that she could now swim. The lesson continued around her, full of people with separate reasons to have begun late. One man was cheerful about every difficulty. Leni found him annoying and then found his cheerfulness useful, without reconciling the two judgments. She spoke to Resta once about where to put the borrowed wrap. Resta answered that practical question. The earlier conversation between them had not been canceled by proximity, embarrassment, or a shared instructor.

Afterwards Leni paid the small charge still due for the lesson and made another booking for after her tour. The private launch fare was already spent. It had purchased a quiet cushion and an upper landing, not the arrival she had imagined. At the list, the instructor asked what to write beside the next initial. ‘Leni,’ she said in her ordinary voice. He wrote it without adding any of the words that followed her name on posters. She did not ask him to remove the first attempt or record her as something other than a beginner.

Outside, visitors were photographing the view through a temporary opening in the promenade screen. They discussed the old painting and whether the singer's cloak had really been that blue. Below them, somebody called for a clean towel. Leni walked up through the working approach with her bag under one arm. At the top she saw Resta adjusting her coat and said goodbye. Resta answered, then went her own way. The feather on Leni's hat had bent against the peg. She considered straightening it and decided she had had enough arrangements for one afternoon. She still had a tour to sing, another lesson booked, and no honest reason to tell anyone she had learned to swim.