In the 2020s, love triangles are all the rage—at least in American literature. The last five years have seen a proliferation of novels about non-traditional triads. Raven Leilani arguably ignited the trend with Luster, followed by Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, and Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss, among others. Each novel featured a female protagonist armed with a sardonic voice, and each used a love triangle to probe social issues related to sex, power, race, gender, and class.
The Lady Waiting: A Novel, Magdalena Zyzak, Riverhead Books, 352 pp., $28, May 2024.
Mostly, these novels have been about American lust. But a new addition to the list, The Lady Waiting by Polish novelist and filmmaker Magdalena Zyzak, offers an international spin on the genre. This mischievously delightful caper centers on the love triangle between a wealthy American couple and their Polish assistant, who conspire to steal a Vermeer.
Although Zyzak, like her predecessors, is interested in the dynamics of sex and power, she throws a new element into the mix: globalization. The Lady Waiting is, beneath the sex, a story of the global economy, where workers from countries on the periphery do most of the labor for a tiny slice of the pie, while investors from the core economies feast.
The Lady Waiting is the second novel by Zyzak, who was born in Poland but has lived in the United States since she was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. Zyzak writes in caffeinated English: On the spectrum of foreign-born writers who switched to English, she is far closer to Vladimir Nabokov than Joseph Conrad—she never passes up a chance at puns, chiasmus, or word play.
The novel opens when a 23-year-old Polish immigrant, Viva, spots a posh woman in a green cocktail dress standing on an island of Los Angeles’s 101 freeway. Viva stops to offer a ride to the woman, who turns out to be a rich Polish-American named Bobby. Soon, Bobby and her husband, Sleeper, a retired U.S. film director, offer Viva a job. They want her to be their live-in help. “Sleeper says our household needs a wife,” Bobby explains.
Viva has been in the United States for a year and is floundering, going unhired because of her faltering English and her failure to absorb American social norms. (When an interviewer asks what her greatest weakness is, Viva answers, “manipulating”; she doesn’t get the job.) Viva never wanted to come to the country in the first place. But a boyfriend convinced her to enter the green card lottery; when she won, everyone told her she’d be crazy not to cash in the ticket. In Poland, she has a “teaching degree, though nothing to teach”; in America, the only job she can get is as a home aid for an older woman who soon dies.
Viva’s reasons for being in the United States crystallize when she meets Bobby, who strikes her as the kind of woman you see on Los Angeles billboards. Bobby is rich and comfortable being rich. She charms Viva at an expensive lunch in Beverly Hills. The waiter brings out rosé and sharing plates, and Bobby says, in characteristically gleeful free association, “People hate rosé but I love it … Doesn’t give you as much of a headache, as long as it’s a quickie, not an affair. Never date a socialist unless he’s the champagne kind. Oh, hey, socialism! We’re going to share all the plates!”
Viva is intoxicated not just by Bobby’s money but also her command of English. When Viva speaks, she is hobbled by her adopted tongue; in Viva’s narration, though, her internal monologue sounds kind of like Bobby’s dialogue. Explaining her origins, Viva narrates: “The man who had impregnated my mother in a rapeseed field—not a metaphor, a major Polish crop—had ridden a motorcycle.”
After lunch, Bobby takes Viva to an expensive boutique, where she steals a $9,000 dress for her. Viva is distraught—she could lose her green card if she’s an accomplice to a crime.
“Why did you steal it?” Viva asks.
“Because I could afford it,” Bobby says with a shrug.
The dress turns out to be a harbinger. Bobby convinces Viva to steal—or fake-steal, in a move that she claims is “neutral legally”—a Vermeer that went missing from a museum nine years earlier, from her ex-husband, a Russian mobster. The fictional Vermeer, “The Lady Waiting,” is a small portrait of a woman seated in front of a window, gazing at her hands. The ex-husband recently acquired it as repayment for a debt, and he’s looking to return it to a German museum that’s offering a 10 million euro reward.
Her ex is outsourcing the job because it would be difficult for a Russian on the Magnitsky list to claim the reward. If they succeed, the Russian ex will get the majority of the 10 million, paying out a million each to his German lawyer as well as the Americans—Bobby and Sleeper. In a mirroring of globalization, Viva, the laborer brought in to do the actual work and assume the actual risk, will get only 1 percent. But 100,000 euros is a life-changing amount for Viva. It might buy her a ticket on the elusive route from immigrant to expat.
As for the love triangle, Viva sleeps first with Bobby, who excites her in context if not action. (“It was not the technique but the situation—that she was my boss—that aroused me.”) Sleeper excites her in a much more straightforward way: “It was remarkable that other men had never made me come, because the whole thing had taken less than two minutes.” It’s Bobby who pushes her to Sleeper—each of them knows of Viva’s involvement with the other—and every time Viva sleeps with Sleeper, it seems to bring him closer to Bobby. She begins to fall for Sleeper, but also for Bobby, in a confusing way: “Sometimes I like you so much I want to be you,” she tells the latter.
Sleeper and Bobby are idle rich. They live like “nineteenth-century aristocrats,” working little and drinking often, in constant pursuit of drollness. Viva is paid $1,000 a week for an unwritten and varying set of tasks that includes making breakfast, bringing ice to cocktail hour in the hot tub, breaking in Bobby’s shoes, and, implicitly, sex. She is alternately ignored, fawned over, spoiled, and humiliated. “Was their behavior an abuse of power if that power was the very thing that turned me on?” she wonders.
Through Bobby, she gets a taste of American opulence. When she tries on Bobby’s expensive boots, she feels a “desire to own them that was akin to lust or hunger.”
“Poor girls from Poland, Russia, Ukraine in my generation had little to no inoculation against luxury products, communism having wiped out most hereditary wealth,” Viva says. “We’d kill for a pair of designer shoes.” When Viva later climaxes with Sleeper, she fantasizes that she is Bobby, surrounded by designer shoes.
The plot to retrieve the painting goes smoothly, but—spoilers ahead—after Viva brings it back, it is stolen from Bobby’s closet. Viva, Bobby, and Sleeper travel to Venice to hunt down the Vermeer, all the while being tailed by a Russian mafia thug. Abroad, their affair turns more overt, and Viva begins sleeping with the couple together. At one point, she catches Bobby watching her have sex with Sleeper. Viva later tells Bobby that she wants to be the one spectating. Bobby replies, “do you really think I care to know what’s in your bird brain? This is my fantasy. Mine, not yours.”
This is when Viva begins to realize, if she hadn’t already, that she is on the lowest rung of this ladder, and if she wants money, power, or choice, she’ll have to break out of the system. She tracks the now thrice-stolen Vermeer to a mining town in Poland, where she buys it from an old lady storing it in her car for a little more than $1,000. The woman lives in a communist housing bloc where, “in an apathetic nod to individualism, each cube was painted a different, faded underwear color: gray-white, dull red, brown-pink, lint blue.” When Viva talks to the woman, she notices in her mouth “a gap from a missing canine, a tiny black door to the mean world I’d escaped, a world where you’re reduced, one indignation at a time, by cheap dentists, expensive priests, needy parents, treacherous children.”
Viva’s emigration isn’t easy for the Americans in the novel to understand. She didn’t leave Poland to pursue a dream: “Where I’m from, fantasies tend to be about revenge, not aspiration.” Nor is she, as a friend of Bobby’s assumes, fleeing “some hellhole where men raped sheep and women gave birth in ditches.” Poland, which acceded to the European Union in 2004, is something of a development success story, and it’s often seen by its neighbors to the east as a land of prosperity and opportunity. But opportunity is relative.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, a Nigerian émigré says of the white people in his adopted country:
they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice.
Viva ambivalently left the “shabby comfort” of home for opportunity. But once she’s walked in the shoes of her U.S. employers’ blend of boundless optimism and reckless shortsightedness, she can’t go back. She swipes the painting, cuts off contact with Bobby and Sleeper, travels to Berlin, gets her own German lawyer, and claims the reward. The consequence of her actions quickly becomes clear when she sees that Interpol has declared Bobby and Sleeper missing, last seen in Russia.
In the real world, it would likely be the worker who bore the consequence of a scheme gone sideways. But Zyzak’s world is more just than ours, in a sense, while still adhering to the hierarchy. Here it’s the wealthy American investors who must answer for their actions and Viva who claims their spot as the aspirational rich.
Toward the end of the story, Viva’s German lawyer recommends that she give up her green card and settle in a tax haven such as the Cayman Islands to keep more of her reward money.
“I think I want to keep my green card,” she says.
“May I ask why?” the lawyer asks.
“Because,” Viva says, “I won it in the lottery.”
Viva may be a millionaire now. But more importantly, she’s an American.
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