Alicia Gladwell-Schwartz, coming home from a suppertime trip to the corner grocery, glanced into her car and saw her husband fucking his brains out. There they were, brains, on the floor underneath the steering wheel, heaped and black in the dark, unless that was the scarf he'd picked out last April, inspired by the one with the snowman on it that their daughter had given him for Christmas, which he refused to wear. She couldn't make out who was under him there at 25th and Clement in the Infinity. The metallic glitter of the emergency blanket was what had caught her eye, a layer of foil over the layer of plastic over foil and so on that would keep them comfortable, he'd insisted, through nights in the high Sierras or wherever they might be when stranded by car crash or earthquake. Of course they wouldn't be in the mountains - they hadn't gone up there in years. Earthquake damage was more likely in San Francisco, and everyone knows the worst crashes happen near home.

It wasn't a comfortable blanket. He wouldn't have bought it with this in mind. And at least they'd covered themselves. It was roiling now like the ocean's surface, the round bump of her husband's behind shifting back and forth, not yet up and down, in about the middle of the car. Some bumps in the rear window must be their feet. They'd put the backs of both seats down. If they hadn't removed a neck rest the other person must be having a bumpy time. She looked at the feet again and the blanket shifted to reveal the rubber tip of a running shoe. Turquoise. A woman, a rather small one at that, much smaller than Alicia.

Her husband's head shifted right. Fingertips pulled up the blanket but not before she glimpsed an artery throbbing in the side of his neck. She'd seen that before, of course, but never realized they bulged and pounded so. The lump under the blanket that must be his shoulder and upper arm looked taut. Those were an arm and shoulder really working to support the weight of a torso he'd bulked up over the past three years with assiduous weight-lifting at the gym. He was holding his weight off the woman. She must be arched over the neck rest with her chest sloping downward, shoulders likely braced, against the front seat. Of the fingers that tugged the blanket Alicia had seen nothing except that they were small and bright green.

Now his head shifted again, further right, and his shoulders moved right as well, quite sensibly, to avoid the chance of thwacking his head on the steering wheel. And bring his head closer to the woman's head. Both shoulders pushed upward. He was really taking care of whomever she might be. A neighbor? Lately Alicia didn't know many neighbors. A lot of the new ones spoke Russian, and although she understood neither Alicia had felt more comfortable, somehow, overhearing Chinese.

An impulsive thing, clearly. He couldn't bring her home and perhaps she couldn't bring him, for similar reasons. And he, at least, wouldn't have cash for a hotel, she was pretty sure, nor would he have wanted to use his credit card. Not since that fight they'd had about money. She really oughtn't have opened that bill in the first place. Though at the time she'd been flush with her first good job and celebrated by paying down some of his debt. But she might have just paid the bill on the credit card without scanning the itemized list and particularly without asking about that cab fare to Millbrae and why he hadn't taken BART.

Why hadn't he at least driven out of the neighborhood if he must carry on? Because the parking place would be gone when he got back and the guy upstairs, who went to work early, would have to be wakened and persuaded man-to-man to get up and go back out his car to make room for the Infiniti in the garage. And the cars starting up and the feet on the stairs might alert the wife. But to park so nearby? Anyone might see the car and him in it. Anyone, such as herself. Clearly they hadn't expected all this. The woman still had her running shoes on. A chance pickup and wriggling free of only as much of their clothing as needful. Yet he was straining his shoulders even now to protect her abdomen.

Pregnant.

He'd been like that with Alicia, too. He always gave his seat on the bus to any woman with the slightest bulge, always asked after the expectant mothers at the day care and grade school when he picked their daughter up. One of the teachers had hinted that people whose mothers' pregnancies had ended in miscarriages often did that. But there had been no such thing in her husband's family. He was simply thoughtful.

How considerate he was, really. All those years while he was the one with the job and she with the debt, her career as a dancer failing to happen, he remained a fan, ever sure the next audition would be her lucky break, never suggesting a job, never never agreeing with her doubts and regrets. When she dropped it, he'd never mentioned it again. And he was thoughtful in so many ways. He called his parents far more often than she did hers and talked longer and always traded expressions of love with them before hanging up. He brought flowers on birthdays, did part of the housework and chatted amiably with her friends.

What if the situation had been reversed? What would he have done if he'd seen her under the earthquake blanket with somebody in their car?

Neither appeared to notice when she opened the Infiniti's door. He'd left the parking brake disengaged, as always, so she didn't have to make any sound by letting it out. Tucking the grocery bag down beside her left foot made the paper rustle, but she closed the door as quietly as she'd used to when their daughter was sleeping in the back. A hybrid, it powered up quietly and crept out of the parking space without any engine noise. The motion under the blanket continued for quite a few blocks. Only when she turned onto the drive through the park, uphill in the shadows of the great cypress trees to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, did they wake to what was going on and then they froze, clearly not knowing what to do.

Alicia didn't, either. Her plan had been something like, stop. Get out. Go home on the bus and let him figure out how he'd got here. Nobody else had the key. But he probably knew already who she was and now they were observing her. They were listening as closely as she had watched. They probably didn't know where they were, exactly. Even when his head poked up, which it did, he couldn't see much but the cypress trunks to the right. Maybe the side of the road, a bit of the downward slope, not the rocky cliffside and the bay.

There wasn't anyplace she could have thrown them off a cliff into the water, no ledge close enough to the road, even had she particularly wanted to and it been late and dark enough. But having thought about the cliff and the water seemed to pull the car a bit right, enough to bring her face to face with the fact that the sun had just recently gone down, the sky not dark yet, the waves against the cliffside visible, and that now, their daughter grown and independent, there was no reason for her husband to have so much debt. And the parents he called so often, how rarely after one of those long conversations in another room did he come out and tell his wife their news. They might have a room and for some reason or other not gone there on this one occasion, or on several occasions when Alicia hadn't happened by the car. This might have been going on for years; the woman could be in her fifties and have a little stiffness in a joint or two as Alicia did and still be lying all contorted over the back of the seat.

So Alicia was relieved when her husband let the blanket slip back around the other head and the face looked young. He pulled it up again, but Alicia had seen her. In fact, she was sure she'd seen this woman before, just now and then, casually, where was it? Going down the street with another young woman, laughing… no, that was somebody else. Pushing a stroller with a very cross little boy in it… no. On the bus, downtown, not her usual bus but one she hopped for some reason or other, maybe getting back to the office from lunch when it rained. That was the one, in a raincoat, ear to a cell phone out of which trailed a thin elderly complaining voice to which she now and then murmured 'Nyet. Nyet.' Alicia knew that word but she hadn't recognized it at first, because the final 't' was so softly, soothingly, fondly whispered, and when she did recognize it she sat thinking how the whisperer must love her querulous old mom or granny or aunt.

She pushed the switch on the armrest to unlock the doors. He gave the woman the blanket and Alicia saw her husband's back, not seeing the one she remembered from years ago as long-married people do, but this back, his back now showing all the veins from its recent exercise and not very muscular. The woman's body underneath its drapes looked thin, the belly swollen a hand's-breadth that left Alicia feeling oddly disappointed that the child would be born with an old female relative already on hand, no need for the father's wife.

He'd gotten his trousers on, and before he shut the car door he mumbled about taking the woman home, quite as if to promise he'd be back, as if it were up to him, as if she'd be too annoyed to give him the satisfaction of a fuss involving lawyers and the changing of locks. Barefoot, though, he couldn't keep up with his lover as she ran away with her arms outspread and the blanket flying in the wind, a silver bird with turquoise feet.