I.

“Capers?”

“Capers.”

“Why?”

“I’m making that chicken thing.”

“I don’t like capers.”

“You don’t have to eat the capers if you don’t want, Al.”

“Capers are expensive.”

This is not the first time he’s called me about the capers. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many times he’s called me about the capers, or the anchovies, or the olives, or the black beans, or the mushrooms, or the pork, or any of the other ingredients he deems, for some vague, irrational, latent reason, entirely objectionable.

“I like capers.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line. In that moment I picture him standing in the aisle, turning the jar in his hand and watching tiny, briny berries the color of camouflage jostle behind the glass as expectant mothers and pimpled stock boys elbow past to reach the rows of artisan ketchup. In that moment I know, perhaps before even he knows, what will come next, because I’m Matt and he’s Al and we’ve lived together long enough to have had this conversation from every aisle in the store — about the potentialities of buffalo tacos (“I really don't know how to cook buffalo, Al”), about the versatility of Malbec (“Just get what’s on sale”), about the substitutes for leeks (“Fuck the leeks”).

“Capers?”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“I’m not getting the capers.”

Fine. Fuck the capers.

II.

Our couch is a hand-me-down from Al’s mother. The once-pristine beige is now spotted with wine, the down cushions deflating rapidly as the feathers poke through the fabric like spring shoots after the snowmelt, but I suppose this is what makes it our couch and not hers, at least not anymore. The couch, you see, is the most important piece of furniture we own. It’s where he sleeps most nights and where I retreat when I can’t, where he checks emails and I grade papers, where he hosts colleagues from work for a few drinks and I watch a movie with the guy I’m seeing — it’s our common territory, our international waters, our Switzerland. But even more than this it’s our hearth, because at the end of the day he comes home from City Hall and I give up on the paragraph that’s giving me fits and the couch is where we meet in the middle.

The couch is where we eat whole-wheat penne with peppers, onions, and chicken sausage in vodka sauce while he hums along to Regina Spektor’s theme song for Orange is the New Black and I hold forth on the failings of Jon Stewart’s interviewing style. Homeland is a standing appointment on Sunday nights and Al can finish Pardon the Interruption in roughly the time it takes to rest the steaks and I can watch whatever film I’m meant to review after he nods off with his computer on his chest. I suspect, remembering my own parents’ long-held detente over Patriots, Red Sox, and Real Housewives, that these are the rhythms of our life together that most closely approximate marriage: our couch is our couch, and nobody else’s, because it’s where we make what you might call a family, a family of two twenty-something men with vastly divergent lives who can scarcely imagine living apart.

III.

It’s a Thursday night in mid-November and I’m planning to host Thanksgiving dinner for the first time. The preparations have dredged up all of life’s nagging questions. Must I brine the turkey? Did I mistakenly invite any vegans? Is there any way to replicate the effect of the “Best Holiday Table Settings Ever!!!” I found on Pinterest without spending the equivalent of a car payment? (The answers are, respectively: “not necessarily”; “no, thank God, I don’t know how to cook anything vegan anyway”; and “definitely not, who the fuck do you think you are, a magician?”) But an elegant meal for fourteen with tall vases of tangerines and stout mason jars of cut flowers is not my former-fraternity-president roommate’s idea of entertaining. As I agonize over the color of the tablecloths and the composition of the stuffing, a flurry of text messages arrives on my phone.

“Yo, so I want to have a party. In our courtyard. And have a DJ, someone to do swanky cocktails, and then a guy that I know does tamales.”

Al “knows a guy” for everything. You want tamales? Done. You need space heaters on short notice? Here’s the number, tell him Al sent you. He knows a guy who can repair your fancy leather shoes (if you own any) or clean your smoke-damaged suits (in the event of a fire). Were you to find yourself in a nursery rhyme, he’d know the butcher, the baker, and the goddamn candlestick maker and probably get you a discount to boot.

“Did you win the lottery? Or just decide not to buy a car?”

“Second. I think we can leverage some people.” I don’t know what this means, though I know enough not to ask. “Throw a Matt and Lebow party.” I do know what this means. It’s shorthand for “rager.”

“You are drunk with riches.”

“Yes. Love it.”

“I am down for a party. I have zero dollars.”

“Feel like we need one. Claim our supremacy.”

A few weeks later, having decided to hold the party on New Year’s Eve, another flurry descends. Someone’s been putting ideas in his head.

“‘Save the World: A New Year’s Eve Affair.’ Party title.”

“No way.”

“Haha.”

“Not a chance.”

“Why not.”

“I will boycott.”

“‘Affair’ stays.”

(I wish “Affair” would not stay. I am afraid people will assume I devised the title, like the year Al decided to throw a party called “Grindr” even after I told him what Grindr was. “You’re not allowed to complain when people think we’re a couple if you’re going to call the party a Grindr party,” I said. “No fucking wonder people think we’re sleeping together.” “I hope your roommate realizes he’s going to get a lot of dudes at this party who hope he swings both ways,” a friend said to me on this point. “Don’t flatter him,” I responded.)

“‘Tick Tock: A NYE Affair.’ Or ‘The Countdown: NYE Affair.’” He’s grasping now.

“Why does it have to have a weird name? What’s it with you and naming parties?”

“Because I want to.”

“Why not just ‘A New Year’s Eve Open House’?”

“Because that’s repetitive. And boring. And shows little thought.”

“I’ll give in on ‘Affair’ if you give up the weird names.”

“I just want some style.”

“‘NYE 2013: A Royal (Street) Affair.’ That’s my best idea for now.”

“That’s why you’ll be famous someday.”

“That’s how I make the big bucks, Al.”

“That’s why you’re my sugar daddy. And Dogg4Lyfe.”

I have never been in love, but I imagine this is what it sounds like.

IV.

If our life were a television series, the opening sequence in the pilot would go something like this:

FADE IN:

EXT. FRENCH QUARTER BISTRO — NIGHT

MATT, ALEX, and MOLLY emerge from the restaurant’s shadowy entranceway, stepping into the glow of the streetlamps. Matt’s face is flush. He rolls up the sleeves of his plaid button-down shirt and pulls on the leg of his skinny jeans. Molly roots around in her purse, cursing whatever it is she’s trying (and failing) to find. Alex wears a tailored gray suit and polished Oxford wingtips. He blinks repeatedly, adjusting to the light. They’ve all been drinking. A lot.

Matt takes a pack of Marlboro Golds and a miniature Bic lighter from his breast pocket and lights a cigarette.

MATT

Happy birthday, Al. I know you don’t like to make a big deal out of it, but I’m glad we at least did something.

MOLLY

Barb and Bern will be happy. Well, except for the bill. Matty, can I bum one of those from you?

MATT

Sure thing.

Matt passes Molly a cigarette and the lighter. Alex is still silent, looking down Chartres Street past St. Louis Cathedral as though trying to make out a figure in the distance.

MATT

You want one, Al?

ALEX (dreamily, to no one in particular)

I think I’m gonna run home.

MATT

Huh?

Alex takes out his iPod, puts in the white earbuds, clicks on a song, and dashes down Chartres Street at a pace neither Matt nor Molly could match, even if they wanted to. (Al runs marathons and bikes forty miles at a stretch. Matt and Molly smoke Marlboros.) He streams through Jackson Square — past the soaring face of the cathedral, past the fortune-tellers folding up card tables and buskers counting the loose change in their guitar cases — and speeds toward home.

MATT

Your brother is the strangest person I’ve ever met in my whole life.

MOLLY

Now you know what I’ve been dealing with for the last 25 years.

MATT

This is why I have a drinking problem.

MOLLY

Get in line.

I’m not sure we’d ever get green-lighted on this basis of this excerpt, because it doesn’t make sense. Then again, it didn’t make sense when it actually happened, either.

VI.

“How do you guys know each other?”

At a certain kind of party, the kind where new acquaintances outnumber old friends — the kind where I stick by Al’s side most of the night because he knows seemingly everybody in town and I spend most of my days sitting alone at a laptop, struggling to find a reason to put on pants — this is the inevitable question. It’s just a pleasantry, a way of making conversation. No one expects a full accounting of our friendship, and anyway the real story is too long and closely held to pitch over the din of a crowded room. In fact, we’ve honed the answer into a kind of performance, a one-act play to reprise at will.

“We went to high school together,” I say.

“But we weren’t friends,” he says.

“And we went to college together.”

“But we weren’t friends.”

“But we knew each other. We were on nodding terms.”

“Acquaintances.”

“We both applied to Teach for America.”

“We didn’t plan it.”

“We ran into each other just before graduation, at a dinner for those who’d accepted an offer, and of course the first thing you ask someone is where they’ve been placed.”

“‘New Orleans.’”

“‘Small world,’ I said. ‘Me too. What grade level?’”

“‘Secondary.’”

“‘Me too. What subject?’”

“‘English.’”

“That’s weird, right? Without ever exchanging much more than a few words, we’d chosen the same boarding school, the same university, and the same organization, and been selected to teach the same grade level and subject area in the same city. At that point I almost assumed we’d end up at the same fucking school.”

“Weird,” he reiterates. At this point we are no longer telling the story for someone else’s benefit. We are rehashing the past for our own. Our story, like our couch, is common territory: even now, after the hundredth recitation, it strikes me as strange that there was a person out in the world who wanted the same things at the same times as I did. That there was — is — a person with whom I shared remarkably little, at least on the face of it, and yet was also, in all of the ways that counted the most, a lot like me. (Is this what people mean when they use the term “soul mate”?)

“To make a long story short,” I say (I always say, I can’t help but say, this is how the story ends), “Al was planning on driving from Boston to New Orleans and I offered to tag along, split the cost of gas. We made the trip in twenty-four hours, straight through the night. Spend that much time alone in a car with someone and by the end you’ll be best friends or worst enemies.”

Reading it back now, the story appears a fiction. In some sense, I suppose it is. Tidied up and parceled out like this, the roughness of the details sanded down into lines and cues, it no longer much resembles my memory of the experience. The way we eased into the conversation as the Boston suburbs became the Pennsylvania countryside and then the dusky blue peaks of Appalachia. The way the music changed and the traffic thinned on a two-lane highway somewhere near Knoxville, as though to signal that we were no longer talking like people who were merely acquaintances, just on nodding terms. The way the tops of the high pines blurred into the black sky along an empty stretch in northern Alabama. As we sped into the endless dark, Al dozing in the passenger seat and the tips of my cigarettes flaring in the wind, I remember feeling for the first time since graduation — because I had left all I knew in Los Angeles, because I had never set foot in New Orleans, because I was a newly minted college graduate with no real notion of who I might become, because all of these things absolutely terrified me — that everything would turn out fine.

In recounting how we became friends, we never seem to get around to explaining why. It is, after all, the answer to another question. Suffice it to say that I still feel most at ease when Al’s dozing off beside me, but you will have understood by now that I’m no longer telling this story for someone else’s benefit.

VII.

Two young men, one straight and one gay, sharing a series of apartments in a faraway city for an inordinate number of years, long after their contemporaries have begun to settle down, shack up, or strike out on their own.

I was once under the impression that this constituted an uncommon arrangement: it was the angle, the hook, the scaffolding built around the edges of this piece. Anecdotally, ours remains an easily mistaken relationship — we’re more often assumed to be “partners” than roommates, though it’s sometimes unclear exactly what kind of business people think we’re getting down to — but I am no longer sure we’re as rare as I assumed. I am no longer sure, at least with regards to certain progressive enclaves (college campuses, cities, Vermont), that our story is worthy of note.

What I am sure of is this.

In the course of life you meet people, and because they are one of the popular kids at school or their fraternity’s president or the mayor’s point man and you are not, you make a judgment about how their internal machinery is wound that inevitably proves false if you allow the relationship to reach its version of Knoxville. At one level or another we are all terrible judges of character and skilled deceivers as to our own, and it’s only through the ungainly work we call “getting to know” someone that we come to understand just how true this is. For a society that valorizes collecting “friends” and “followers,” “likes” and “favorites” and “shares,” we discuss the bared and grinding gears of true friendship all too rarely — the way it sneaks up on you, the way it moors you, the way it becomes, in certain iterations, as profound as romantic love and sometimes as troublesome. The way, in short, a person in the world becomes your person, and you theirs.

Our story is worthy of note only insofar as every friendship has its Knoxville, its grocery lists, its claims to supremacy; its inside jokes, its nonsensical sequences, its lines and cues; its vulnerabilities and trusts and standing appointments. We all have our person, and if pressed on the matter I suspect you’d admit that yours arrived on your doorstep less by choice than by chance, or even fate — someone who wants the same things at the same times, who may be on the face of it remarkably different, but who is, in all of the ways that matter the most, a lot like you.

What I am sure of is this.

Our story is worthy of note only insofar as it isn’t our story at all.