Jacob Ellsworth was finding it difficult to compete with a skywriter for a woman’s heart. Especially in Kalispell, Montana, on a windless morning in the spring of 1926 when the sky was vast and blue and his competitor’s smoky statement of love would likely hold its sentiment for the entire afternoon.

Blakely’s written something again? Ellsworth asked the hotel clerk, Mr. Bristol.

Mornings were normally bad for Ellsworth’s vertigo, but this one had been particularly unsettling. That morning, Ellsworth’s balance was precarious enough that the only way for him to arrive to breakfast was to unceremoniously bump down the front stairs on his ass.

“Indeed,” Bristol told him. “And there’s a rumor that he’s going back up again tonight.”

Since Ellsworth’s arrival, Mr. Bristol had become an indispensable ally. For a nominal fee, the clerk kept Ellsworth abreast of the yondered overtures of Willem Blakely, made the necessary calls to Dr. McGillicutty for Ellsworth’s healing powders, provided important insight into Miss Jessica Yates’ strange and wonderful heart.

“Does this man ever sleep?” Ellsworth asked.

Ellsworth widened his stance, steadied himself on the pane of the bay window. He looked out onto the street at Willem Blakely’s biplane, a growling mouth painted on its cutter. Blakely had parked the plane right in front of the bank, like it was some brindled mare thirsty for the trough. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Blakely leaned on the metallic beast now, holding court with a gaggle of cowpunchers and oil riggers. All of the men kept pointing to the sky and then slapping and reslapping Blakely’s broad back.

Ellsworth closed his eyes. Without his healing powders, his body felt like a small boat fighting a horrible squall—up then down, waves and swells, again and again. He went down to a knee, overcome.

“Summon Dr. McGillicutty,” he told Bristol.

Even though he was unable to stand for extended periods of time, Ellsworth still had certain merits. His most recent invention—a candlewick that burned twice as long as the industry standard—had brought him considerable fame within the candlewicking and wax-molding worlds. And while he was not particularly handsome, Ellsworth wasn’t unseemly either. He sported a well-groomed beard. He smoked a good-smelling pipe. He used his monocle only when it was absolutely necessary.

Even with these attributes, Ellsworth could not escape the uneasy feeling in the pit of his barrel chest, that in this particular instance, competing with the square-jawed Mr. Blakely, he was far out of his league.

It was obvious. Obvious to the entire town of Kalispell, who regarded Ellsworth as a dizzy interloper. Obvious to Blakely, the hometown war hero who’d shot down 17 enemy planes in the Great War. But most of all, it was obvious to Ellsworth. Even though he told himself otherwise, he could not sugarcoat what he saw in the mirror each morning—that he was a stout man, that he was a man prone to mucus, that he was a man whose eyes were perpetually set in a wincing squint.

And yet, and yet, and yet. For some strange reason, these things did not seem off-putting to Miss Jessica Yates. Just that afternoon at the bank—her hair curled into dropping ringlets, her ample bust fighting gravity like a wall shelf— Miss Yates was as encouraging to Ellsworth as she’d ever been.

“Sit down right here,” she told him, pulling a chair close enough for him to smell the lemon verbena dotted behind her ears.

“Will you call upon me tonight?” she asked.

This would be the third time that Ellsworth had called upon her that week. While Blakely filled the sky with words of his undying love for Miss Yates, Ellsworth spent quiet hours with his feet firmly planted on the floorboards of her living room.

“I’ll be by at 7,” Ellsworth said. “And I’ll bring more of Mr. Bristol’s ragtime records.”

Miss Yates looked up from her ledger and smiled at him—she had good teeth. Right then, Ellsworth thought about her using them to bite him. Right on his chest, hard, right through his skin. Suddenly he wanted her to take a big chunk out of his body, take it and never give it back.

“That would be lovely,” she told him. “You have so much more to tell me about New York.”

City life certainly held Miss Yates’ fascination. Each night Ellsworth sat on her sofa she prodded him for stories—about the nightlife, about plays and movies that he’d seen, about the famous people he knew.

Ellsworth had already recounted the time he’d seen Fatty Arbuckle on the Upper West Side. This was before all of Fatty’s troubles, before his ruinous trial, Fatty dressed like a dandy, standing at a deli counter ordering sandwiches and potato salad, a woman on each of his elbows.

“What was he like?” she’d asked Ellsworth.

“He was fat,” Ellsworth told her. “Just like you’d think.”

Miss Yates had this well-worn magazine that showed beauty portraits of dewy-eyed starlets dressed in their fineries. Whenever the conversation lagged with Ellsworth, she opened it and carefully turned the pages, telling Ellsworth how much she’d already missed by living in Kalispell.

“The only stage we have here is the one in the whorehouse,” she told him. “I mean, if you haven’t realized it yet, this town’s completely bereft of cultural goings-on.”

Even though Ellsworth was growing somewhat weary with her interest in big cities, he did not let on. While Miss Yates was certainly fetching, there was something else, something much more important that drew Ellsworth to her. Whenever he was in her vicinity, the vertigo that he had mysteriously caught traveling back to the east from San Francisco, the ass-over-teakettle dizziness that had forced him off the train in Kalispell to recuperate, it all slid away. When Miss Yates was near him, Ellsworth’s world rotated back into balance, the overwhelming pressure in his ears leaked away, there was no longer a need for the ballast of McGillicutty’s healing powder. The horizon was finally, for Ellsworth, where the horizon was supposed to be.

“Come back with me,” he begged her once again. “And I’ll show you all of it.”

But then, but then, but then. When he was not in the presence of Miss Yates, Ellsworth spent much of his time alone in his hotel room, lying on the lumpy bed, staring up at cobwebbed ceiling.

This dire view, coupled with the ponderous thoughts that bumped to and fro in his roiling head, made it hard for Ellsworth not to question his place in Miss Yates’ heart.

One thing that helped buoy Ellsworth during these periods of doubt was Mr. Bristol. Bristol came to his room toting a bottle of bourbon, sat in the overstuffed chair by the bed, and gossiped about Blakely’s bona fides.

“He caught syphilis when he was a flyboy in the war,” Bristol told him. “And he was married once previous.”

Back east, Ellsworth would have thought Bristol a classless toady, would not have sipped bourbon with the man, but here in this forsaken town, Ellsworth was glad for the bottle, glad for the bonhomie.

“And I heard there’s a newborn three counties over,” Bristol continued. “A jilted lover that goes along with the kid.”

Ellsworth hoped these words Bristol spouted about Blakely were God’s honest, but who knew? Ellsworth paid Bristol and he couldn’t help but wonder whether these statements about Blakely weren’t born out of commerce. He took another pull from the bourbon, passed the bottle back to Bristol.

“What it boils down to,” Bristol told him, “is that Miss Yates sees the bad in him and she sees the good in you. That’s all you need to know. That’s why.”

Later that day, after Bristol had left him, Ellsworth attempted to convince himself of Bristol’s words, but he could not. From the outset, he’d wondered if he was a cuckold, an actor in some demented play that Miss Yates’ had authored to simply make Blakely crazy with jealousy.

The worst part of all of it, something Ellsworth could surely see even without his monocle, something there was no way for him to dismiss, was that Blakely and Miss Yates made a fine couple. Both of their faces were symmetrical and finely featured and their bodies looked cut from the same sculptor’s blade. They fit together.

Ellsworth and Miss Yates? His only hope was small—he’d seen plenty of pretty women in New York overlook a man’s physical defects for a thick pocketbook.

Lying on his bed now, Ellsworth dug into the breast pocket of his shirt. He pulled out his packet of McGillicutty’s healing powder. Instead of brewing it into a tea as the doctor had suggested, Ellsworth had taken to snorting it directly. He poured a bit onto his knuckle now and then pushed it up into his nostril. His eyes watered and he felt the chalky resolve in his throat and then he felt the powder hit his blood stream. A chill went up his spine. He teetered upward, made his way over to his valise. He opened it, took out one of the prototype candles he’d shown the wax manufacturers in San Francisco. He struck a match, lit it.

In the candlelight, standing in front of the mirror, Ellsworth sucked in his gut and then buttoned his vest. He yanked his suspenders over his shoulders. He took a deep breath, slid on his tweed jacket.

On his walk to Miss Yates’ that evening, Ellsworth had the distinct pleasure of watching Blakely write a new message of love in the night sky. By now Blakely’s flights had turned into a community activity, like a threshing bee or fireworks on the Fourth, everyone coming out of their houses and lying down blankets by the riverbed. Ellsworth sauntered down Main Street as Blakely’s plane dipped and rose. Jess, they said in unison.

Then, Jess will you. Then Jess will you ever. Finally, the town of Kalispell chanted Blakely’s contrailed query out loud like a perverted Greek chorus. Jess, they yelled, will you ever be mine?

As Ellsworth walked, the pressure in his ears steadily increased and his legs became shaky. About a block away from Miss Yates’, he could not continue. He staggered over to the curb, collapsed. He sat down just in time to watch Blakely dot the question mark by dropping straight down toward the Earth and then pulling his smoke lever for just a second. A small round puff, like it had come from Ellsworth’s pipe. It was so impressive, the precise dotting of that question mark, that Ellsworth forgot who was flying the plane, forgot where he was, forgot that he was supposed to hate Willem Blakely. Ellsworth was caught up in the moment and before he noticed what he was doing, before his brain could stop his hands, he feverishly began to clap.

Outside Miss Yates’ door, Ellsworth steadied himself with another knuckle’s worth of McGillicutty’s powder. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, knocked. When the door swung open, the first thing Ellsworth noticed were Miss Yates’ cheeks. They were rosier than normal, full of a rageful fire. She spun away from him without a word, walked to her decanter of speakeasy scotch, poured three fingers into a lowball, brought it to her lips and swallowed.

“No one owns me,” she said walking to the window. “No one pressures me into anything.”

Ellsworth was still holding Bristol’s ragtime records under his arm and he stood and watched Miss Yates fume. She was wearing a red dress and had her hair pulled back in a bun. She stood in front of the window, shaking her head back and forth. “No one could ever own you,” he assured her. “That would be impossible.”

Miss Yates stayed at the window while Ellsworth moved to the phonograph. He pulled a record from the sleeve, set it down.

He wound the player and he dropped the needle and the sound of a jaunty piano filled the room. Miss Yates had sung for him the last time he was here, extremely well in fact, sung in a lilting soprano with one of the Joplin records he’d brought. After she’d finished the song, it seemed to Ellsworth like there was maybe nothing Miss Yates couldn’t do—that her life might be wasted by anyone she was with, that maybe there wasn’t anyone in this world who could make her truly happy.

“This town,” she said shaking her head. “As if their carrying on is going to make my heart overflow with love.”

Miss Yates sat down next to him on the couch then, took his hand in hers. Ellsworth had thought he would be prepared for something like this, for such a small amount of affection, a concrete sign of her interest, but he was not. He realized then that Miss Yates’ touch, no matter how chaste, made him dizzy again, but in a completely different way, a way he would choose no matter the cost.

“Come back east with me,” he begged again.

Miss Yates slid her hand from his fingers. She walked back to the window, stood there looking out. She turned back to Ellsworth, set her gaze on him.

“Fine,” she told him. “I will.”

Ellsworth suspected that Blakely was drunk that next morning when he went up in his biplane. He watched as Blakely filled the sky with this white smoky mess, a child’s angry scribble.

“She must have told him,” Bristol said as he loaded Ellsworth’s bags into the surrey. Ellsworth had to admit that Bristol had been a godsend that morning. He’d coordinated the sleeping car with the train steward, procured a rig to take them to the platform, cabled Ellsworth’s people in New York about the couple’s impending arrival.

“Must have,” Ellsworth nodded.

Looking up at the sky, Ellsworth actually felt for Blakely, understood that his competitor’s heartache might well have been his own. At the same time, Ellsworth’s empathy was a small undercurrent in the buoyancy that filled his heart. He was brimming, hadn’t needed a grain of McGillicutty’s powder that entire morning. His legs felt as good as they had in weeks, vigorous and sturdy.

He and Bristol drove the surrey over to Miss Yates’s, gathered up her bags. She was wearing a yellow dress and a large brimmed sunhat, her braided hair snaking down her spine.

“Are you ready, my darling?” Ellsworth asked.

The next morning, when the train arrived in Chicago, she would tell Ellsworth that she needed some fresh air. And she would leave the train and not return.

Now though, now as they made their way to the station in Kalispell, her gloved hand sat like a white pearl in Ellsworth’s palm. He wrapped his fingers around it, squeezed. Miss Yates looked up at him, smiled.

“Those teeth,” Ellsworth thought to himself, “those beautiful teeth.”