I am reassured that my secret is safe, because the huge storefront windows are obscured nearly to ceiling height by the store's goods: racks of hunting vests and pants, some bright orange, some camouflage; brown cardboard cases of survival food; two walls of holsters, gun belts and bullet magazines; displays crowded with shimmering fishing lures; and vast stacks of miscellaneous gun and hunting tchotchkes, most in ever-fashionable black. I walk up to the glass counter, which is packed with pistols neatly lined up on velvet with price tags turned out so I don't even have to ask. I look for a while as a businessman in rolled-up sleeves leans one elbow on the cash register and talks about how he's going to cook the wild duck he shot last weekend. The beefy guy restocking the holster selection half-listens, nodding, occasionally cutting his eyes my way with a friendly glance.

I feel timid, the way I felt a decade earlier, freshly out of the military and trying to come out of the closet, the first few times I went into a lesbian bookstore in the Village (unsurprisingly gone today, as most gay and lesbian bookstores are gone, victims of assimilation, acceptance and the Web). I was living in New York, a period when I was disabusing myself of the notion that I wanted to live there again. In this small store on a hard-to-find side street, I would browse the pitiful selection of well-thumbed books on dusty shelves while thick-waisted older women with crew cuts stood around jawing about some big old contretemps that had taken place at the Gay and Lesbian Center the previous night.

I always wondered if I was supposed to join in the conversation, or just buy my book and leave. Leave is what I did every time, wimp that I was, though I would ever so daringly remove my purchase from its bag on my way home so everyone on the subway car would know I was reading The Price of Salt or the latest issue of The Lesbian Connection. Each time I did this, tilting the book or magazine so the title was visibly displayed, I hoped I might then lock eyes with the love of my life, sitting right across from me on the Number 7 train, or at least meet someone who could give me a clue; though these things naturally never happened — well, they did, but not on the subway.

In the gun store, I am wondering what I should say to the man restocking the holsters when from behind the business end of the gun counter materializes a plump, pretty woman in a sleeveless white top, glossy brown curls streaming past her shoulders. She is smiling at me. (Perhaps the man at the counter pressed a hidden button: CHICK ALERT! GET THE LADY CLERK!) I tell her it's been a long time since I shot a gun, and I'm really just looking. (In a gun shop, the catechism begins: "Have you ever shot a gun?" The right answer is "Yes, and it was good." I can never tell if I gain or lose points by reciting my conquests: M16; .22; .357; and the loaded .38 special I carried in war-game exercises, lightly touching its leather holster from time to time, the way I unconsciously touch my breasts when I'm reading a particularly good book.)

"Is this for personal protection, or for recreation?" asks the shopgirl, delicately.

"I'm not sure. Maybe both," I say, mesmerized by the candy in the counter.

I see from the shopgirl's smile that she knows I've been thinking about a gun all along. Without prompting, she reaches under the counter and pulls out a piece of paper listing local rifle ranges, the letters blurred from repeated copying. Withdrawing a pen tucked into her bodice, she circles three ranges she says I will "really like" (though I don't know her criteria, and I am afraid to ask). She then says she has just the thing for me and disappears into the back of the store, returning a moment later with a smooth black plastic case. She opens it, revealing a nine millimeter semi-automatic Glock, its black matte contours nestled in dimpled pink foam. With one brisk motion she cracks back its slide, revealing the empty, waiting chamber, then offers the Glock to me butt-first.

My heart thumps. I slowly accept the gun with my left hand, watching through the corner of my eyes so I know the shopgirl is observing how nicely, how safely, how carefully I handle the pistol, always pointing it down and away. This delicacy, this attention to detail, this awareness that I must Never Point At Anything I Don't Plan to Shoot: in my shyness, this is the closest I can get to flirting, an activity I should not be engaged in anyway — except that as long as I am in a gun shop, an activity which I know would earn me a severe scolding from my beloved, I might as well be naughty all around.

The gun feels much too good. It feels as good as the first time I cupped a woman's breast in my hands, a moment where everything I had ever known before suddenly seemed wrong or boring or grey. The Glock fits my hand perfectly, with that same compelling sense of magical, inevitable destiny. My index finger curls in the trigger, and I gently heft the pistol, considering its weight and admiring its delicately tooled crevices, its sumptuously rounded muzzle. I run my right hand across the twin nubs of its sights while inhaling the light musk scent of gun oil; then I slowly trace my fingers along the smooth, silky curves of the barrel before toying with the dark recesses of the pistol's frame. I feel myself succumb. I am born for this gun. It is costly; it is dangerous; it is beautiful. It is, perhaps, irresistible.  n°

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