Free Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti Page A

the crest of Mount Hollywood. A thousand feet below, the lights of Los Angeles glowed like circuits on a computer board.
    I should really try to conjure a more tender image , he thought. How about this: at night, seen from above, the city looked like the cover of a greatest hits album by a country rock band . Like fireflies pinned in a case, slowly dying. Like the spark of hope snuffed out in a thousand silent rooms . . .
    He would have to work a bit harder.
    “It’s so beautiful up here,” said the young woman beside him, who was nestled in the crook of her boyfriend’s arm. “I can’t believe I’ve lived in this city all my life and I’ve never been to the observatory.” She clutched her boyfriend’s hand, brought it up to her cheek in an old-fashioned gesture. “Did you know about it, Asad?”
    “Yes, moron,” Asad said, playfully. “Some of us look up when we’re driving.” Taking her shoulders, Asad turned her toward the domed white building to their left, luminous against the purple sky. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen Rebel Without a Cause , Tay. I know what we’re watching next movie night.”
    “Anything’s better than Hostel Part 15 ,” the girl said, but she was smiling. “Or whatever you made us watch last time.” Taylor slid closer to her fiancé, pressed her face to his shoulder.
    Kenneth Deller felt an unaccustomed lurch: he hoped they would make it. He’d been working with them for two weeks, and the bafflement he felt when they first contacted him hadn’t diminished a bit. They’d chosen one of his mid-price packages, From Friend to Forever, which usually attracted a lesser class of lover. Taylor and Asad seemed as plump with good fortune as any two people he’d ever met, blemish-free from skin to soul. She was studying to be a doctor, while he, on the same campus, trained as a pharmacist. They seldom interrupted each other, and their glances were filled with affection as well as hunger. They were already luckier in love than he had ever been.
    Even these two, however, were not immune to the American desire to quantify self-improvement. What had drawn them to From Friend to Forever was its promise: “Five steps to long-lasting love, tailored to suit your particular relationship, based on the romantic history we’ll discover at some of the city’s most iconic landmarks.” He loathed the word iconic, but this was a small price to pay in the quest for clients.
    Deller beckoned them across the lawn where a few couples strolled, post-dinner and pre-coital.
    “Here,” he said, “is Colonel Griffith J. Griffith’s monument to his sorrow.”
    “Isn’t it an observatory?” Asad asked.
    “It is, or it was once. But it’s also a temple to one man’s folly, his failure to grasp the ineffable power of love.”
    He worried for a moment that he’d over-egged the pudding, but Taylor said dreamily, “The ineffable power of love. You know, Ken, I do love your accent.”
    He hid a smile. The Manchester in his voice had lured scores of posh London girls to his bed, and horrified an equal number of their parents. But it carried no subtle class codes here. He was merely English, and thus a sophisticate.
    Taylor stared at the building, which was lit as carefully as a movie star, its three darkened copper domes shadowy against the sky, its name picked out in Art Deco type above the front doors: Griffith Observatory.
    “Griffith J. Griffith was a scoundrel, a pint-sized chancer from the Welsh Valleys,” Deller continued. He walked toward the path that separated the building from the mountain’s edge, and they followed. “He was no more a soldier than I am. But he climbed Los Angeles society as if it were a ladder, and on the way up, he — a good Episcopalian — found himself a beautiful Catholic wife.”
    They’d walked around the corner of the observatory, and a wide, white plaza stretched before them, its ramp curving around the hill like the train of a bridal