We were supposed to be inside by now.
The gallery opens at five. It is five twenty-two. We are standing on the sidewalk in Carmel in fifty-two degrees because Pell saw a sign about the roundabout construction on Laureles Grade and became, in his words, "philosophically interested" in traffic engineering. This is not a thing he was interested in before today. This is a thing he became interested in seven minutes before we were supposed to walk through a door.
"The roundabout," he said, reading the construction notice like it was a museum placard, "is actually a more equitable traffic solution than a four-way stop." He said this to me. I have a master's degree in art history. We were standing outside an art gallery.
I had been looking forward to this. Antieau Gallery, artist-owned, grand opening weekend, the kind of place where the work is strange and good and someone always has a plastic cup of white wine. I had worn a good jacket. I had earned this.
Pell is wearing a fleece he has owned since college. He is using it as a canvas for his opinions about urban planning.
I told him we could go inside and he said yes, absolutely, one second, and then he pulled out his phone to look up the history of roundabouts in California, which — I want to be clear — is not something anyone has ever needed to do. He showed me a statistic. I do not remember the statistic. I remember standing there while a light fog came in off the water and the temperature dropped another degree and somewhere inside that gallery there was a glass of something cold and a painting that probably cost more than my car.
He did eventually look up from his phone. He said, "Did you know this whole area is doing a Carmina Burana thing this weekend? Like, outside? With minstrels?"
I said I did know that, yes, I had mentioned it.
He said, "We should go."
I said, "We are currently at the thing we planned to go to."
He said, "Right, but after."
This is the central challenge of Pell. He is not uninterested in the things we plan. He is additionally interested in every adjacent thing. He is a person who cannot walk past a farmers' market without knowing the provenance of three different stone fruits. He once made us forty minutes late to a dinner reservation because he got into a conversation with a stranger about the difference between biodynamic and organic wine, and then was delighted by this, and then ordered a biodynamic wine at dinner and talked about that conversation.
He loves things. He is chaos. These are the same trait.
We finally went inside. The work was genuinely beautiful — big layered pieces, color that felt like it was breathing — and Pell stood in front of one canvas for so long that a gallery employee came over to see if he needed anything. He did not need anything. He was simply deciding that he needed to know more about how the artist built up the texture. He asked three questions. The employee, to their credit, seemed charmed.
I accepted a plastic cup of white wine. I looked at the art. The fog had lifted outside, the late afternoon starting to feel almost warm through the windows, that particular Carmel light that shows up like it's doing you a favor.
Pell found me by a smaller piece near the back. He said, "This is the best thing we've done in a while."
I said, "We almost didn't come in."
He said, "But we did come in."
This is also a central challenge of Pell. He is technically correct.
He held my hand on the way out. He said he thought we had time to walk by the Carmina Burana thing before the choral part started, and then we could find somewhere with tasting menus, and also he'd seen something online about a rosé event happening in the village, and had I heard anything about Carmel Culinary Week because apparently it started soon and he thought we should plan around it.
I said that was four things.
He said, "Three and a half."
It was fifty-five degrees and the sun was coming out and somewhere two blocks over someone was probably in full minstrel costume and Pell had a plan, loosely, and I had a good jacket, and honestly, I've been doing this long enough to know when to just say yes.
We walked toward the music.