“Olive Days”, the debut novel from author Jessica Elisheva Emerson, released on Tuesday. Playboy is pleased to present the first chapter of a novel Kirkus Reviews called “intense” and “uninhibited.”

Part I

June 2011.

Yoni had just turned three, but Rina’s thighs and stomach were still lumpy; nothing had reverted to curves, not like after Shosh was born. She was examining the pucker of a thigh when David proposed adultery, although he refused to use the word. “A wife swap?” Rina said. It was the deviant bit of budding summer when observant Jews, un-encumbered by holidays, have long stretches of time in which to practice something other than devotion to god. The purple jacaranda superbloom of May was waning, but wildflowers stretched from cracks in the concrete sidewalks, searching for a sun that would shroud itself until July. David didn’t like the word swap, either. Her thigh rebuked him with a quiver; she did not look up. “Temporary,” he said. “A trade. A spouse trade.” He emphasized the word spouse, as if parity made it okay.

She looked up at David—already his prematurely silver hair pomaded into peaks and skullcapped at 5:00 a.m., his cheeks slick with the oil he used to calm his old pockmarks—and then back down at her thigh, ran her fingertips over the divots. So tedium came on this fast. They’d been going to the gym. He knew she was trying, he went with her each morning, after she dropped the kids at her mother’s, before he went to the office, just to make sure she went, maybe. Haredim didn’t work out at mixed-gender gyms, of course, but many modern Orthodox like Rina were devotees, especially of a particular mega gym in her Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles. She wore a knee-length skirt over her spandex, just like the rest of them, but didn’t cover her hair. The wig hair never moved as it should, and headwraps yellowed with sweat. The unmarried girls pushed the boundaries of cultural modesty with tight shirts and sheer skirts, flaunting their hair, which they didn’t have to think about hiding until marriage. Skirt hems caught in pedals at spin classes; men’s ritual fringes bounced and twisted beneath T-shirts. David and his friend Brandon jogged side by side every morning, fringes swinging in tandem, and Rina—on an elliptical in the row behind listening to podcasts—had not imagined that the men were talking about tiring of their wives, about swapping them.

“You’re bored?” she said. She was bored, god she was bored, but she never let herself think about it. She rubbed lotion onto her leg.

“It’s a thing that people do. It helps marriages last,” David said.

“You sound like a child,” she said. “‘It’s a thing that people do.’ I’ve heard all about their parties. The neighborhood’s muddy secret.”

Shavuot was weeks earlier and they were fine then. She looked at his reflection in the mirror—his smile always looked uncertain, not just in uncertainty—and smelled her hands, wishing Shavuot was still on them. It was one of David’s favorite holidays because it celebrated Ruth, the first Jewish convert. He wasn’t a convert, but ba’al teshuvah, a Jew who grew up nonobservant and initiated strict observance in his own life. A choice she once cherished.

Rina also was fond of Shavuot. As a child she loved standing on a stool in the open-windowed kitchen and helping her mother form tray after tray of savory bureka pastries, and the woody smell and spicy sap of her hands after she spent the morning hanging eucalyptus branches in shul. Still, now, when she bit into a bureka, she relished the crackling brine of the farmer’s cheese with a leafy, astringent undertone, the remembered taste of eating them by the handful with unwashed hands. With guilt she would sometimes exhale after a bite; her ever-sanitized children would never know the taste of branches and sap.

At its core, Shavuot wasn’t a religious holiday, and she was discovering that, at her core, she wasn’t a religious person. Rina’s father, and also her husband, stayed out all night on Shavuot learning Torah, but it was just sacerdotal buffer between the bookish and the world beyond. Shavuot was about the grain harvest in ancient Canaan, a celebration of nature and effort and bounty. In Israel, kibbutzniks filled their tractor bucket loaders with grain and showered the harvest down on revelers. In America, there wasn’t what for wives to do other than make burekas and cheesecake and wait for their husbands to trudge home in the early morning, weary from study.

Until the gloomy Tisha B’Av in late summer—which came with all sorts of prohibitions against bathing, swimming, traveling, eating, drinking, or fucking—Rina and David were bound by nothing more than weekly Shabbos observance and, nearly as Jewy, regular Dodgers games. The weeks hadn’t been great, but they’d been fine. The same.

“We don’t think—I don’t think—that Leviticus forbids it,” David said. Rina moved her hands from her nose to cover her eyes. “There are rules; Brandon and Anat have already done this. There are rules not to do these things with people who live within three blocks. So it shouldn’t be your neighbor.”

  “You can’t make it halachicly sound. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’” Rina said.

  Well,” David said. “What is adultery? If it’s consensual, does it count?”

***

It happened a month later, just after her thirtieth birthday. Rina could not remember giving her consent, but she hadn’t mounted any particular dissent. She knew what Jewish law said—knew the source material, the rabbinic code, the commentaries—and he was wrong. She didn’t care about the law, was unconcerned with sin, but it galled her that David tried to justify instead of saying I want. They’d talked about it every night, so much that a week out there was nothing left to say. David could not see that once his excitement ruptured in a rabid five-minute breach, his conscience would suffer and she would be punished.

Shabbos goes out late in the summer, so the couples, four total, gathered a little after nine on Saturday night. They met in Brandon’s living room, a half mile from Rina and David’s townhome, past the neighborhood’s small circular park with its dry fountain and Mexican fan palms. Only half a mile away, but the townhomes and dingbat apartments on stilts gave way quickly to Spanish-style homes with archways and red tiled roofs, here and there a 1920s Tudor with small brown turrets, star jasmine vining up brick mailboxes. They went to Brandon’s because he had one of those Spanish-style homes, four bedrooms built around a courtyard, plus a guesthouse. His four children were at their grandparents’ for the night. Music played from surround-sound speakers, guitar and accordion, the nameless music of nameless bistros, and Brandon’s wife, Anat, served red wine. Rina squinted at the little charms on the stem of each glass, at her own pewter flamingo; whether or not wineglasses were confused at the outset seemed beside the point.

There were bowls of nuts on the coffee table and a bottle of Scotch with tumblers, though no one had reached for it yet. The men talked about what the shul might do with the empty lot it just acquired (playground, event hall, parking lot) and the women, Rina included, talked about their children. It was the type of night where pints of ice cream and a board game might materialize.

Brandon cleared his throat and smiled at the floor.

She and David were the only first-time swingers in the room. Brandon and Anat went over the ground rules, and it sounded as if they were talking about a recipe cut from a newspaper and variations on how one might prepare it.

The apple bread is sublime, but don’t use a jelly roll pan as the recipe suggests; put it in a loaf pan. If you and your evening partner decide to practice sodomy, a fresh condom must be put on prior to beginning and another fresh one after. You will find an ample supply next to the bed in each room, along with a trash bag.

The thing about sexual anomaly, Rina learned from a college boyfriend who liked her to shock his balls with a homemade device, and from David the first time he put a household object in her ass, is that in the moment it doesn’t feel like an anomaly at all.

 After the rules were delineated—god she hoped not to invoke most of them—partners were chosen by drawing names out of a hat, which had been a subject of debate between Rina and David in their negotiations. David seemed not to care which wife he drew. Rina didn’t care who he drew, either, every choice an equal cheat, but she would rather have known in advance who she’d be letting inside her. They’d received a list of potential invitees two weeks earlier and part of the deal was being willing to switch partners within any of the couples on the list. It went unspoken that this was a good-looking, good-smelling sort of club. No one was too zaftig, no adult acne, untended teeth, halitosis—none of the lumpish features that sometimes came with limited gene pools. Probably everyone would vote for Obama again. They were young, even though they all had children. They were living in a time of the young; there was a feeling among them that they could do anything they wanted. Elect a Black president, carry tiny computers in their pockets, adopt nuanced views about Israel/Palestine, serve quinoa for Shabbos, paint pottery instead of going to medical school, commit adultery with good-looking friends and call it kosher. She’d agreed to anyone but, please god, not Russ Mordka, not Danny Farber and his cartoonish mouth.

The women’s names were typed on index cards, each folded down the middle and placed in one of Brandon’s upturned black fedoras. The men would choose after the women left the room. Rina reached for the whisky, although no one offered. Maybe it was there to ease her and David, newcomers, into the night, or maybe they’d all be drinking it later to forget, but Rina drank a triple in one swallow. Anat gave a small cough, as if she’d downed it herself, and Rina saw that her drink had commanded the attention of the men. After all, why were they there? She poured another.

Each wife was assigned a bedroom by matching index cards taped to the bedroom doors, and it did not seem happenstance that Anat was assigned the private guesthouse.

Rina followed the others down the hall, each with a charmed wineglass, until she came to the door that said rina kirsch. She entered without a word to the others and closed the door of her room almost all the way to wait for a man. The men coming to the women like this, as if a question; like the Haredi custom of a husband laying his kippah on the pillow of his wife’s single bed on the evenings he wanted sex.

She’d been assigned a guest bedroom—bed-in-a-bag linens and museum-shop art prints—instead of one of the children’s rooms, thank god, but as she looked at the column of dim, brown light in the crack of the door, she felt like a child who’d been tucked in and left to wrestle with her own imaginings. Oh, to put on a nightgown, curl up under the comforter, and hope. Was this how her own children felt at night, glad to be left alone with their thoughts, yet hopeful that someone would come redeem them?

She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand under her skirt. She’d shaved her legs just hours before—a rarity these days, although David made it known he preferred her groomed—but already they were stubbled. Would he care? She’d also used plenty of deodorant and the dregs of a bottle of white gardenia body spray from under her bathroom sink. Would she taste bitter? She flushed in spite of herself and her own primal scent mingled with the gardenia.

The pile of condoms on the nightstand loomed. Also, a trash bag and a tube of K-Y Jelly; it was brand-new, thank god. She looked away from the nightstand and its threats. She was the prettiest wife in the house, and David must have known it. He was an ass man, though, always said he preferred a runner’s ass, a thing Rina did not possess. Would the wife he drew be surprised at his proclivities? Would he be brave enough to break into the lube? She looked back at the table. Anat had put a single daisy in a bud vase next to the lamp, and this small act of hospitality and suggestion of romance baffled her more than anything. She picked it up and was staring at its bruised and drooping petals when Brandon walked in the room and closed the door behind him with a click of the button lock. Oh god, she should have peed first.

Already tipsy, she finished her wine in one long pull and smiled. Brandon was a little younger and shorter than David. He didn’t have the kinky, sallow hair or under-trimmed goatees of the other husbands in the hat. He wasn’t as handsome as David, but charismatic and muscled, with a frat-boy, devil-mouth smile that put people, including Rina, at ease.

“I’ve never had a blonde. Does the rug match?” he said. She pulled down her skirt waistband to show him, no reason to draw it out. He gave a low whistle. “You’re going to remember this,” he said.

The rest of his words—he talked a lot, sweet and filthy—were lost in the breathy, hour-long tangle. She came twice,something that hadn’t happened in all her years with David. The first was immediate, as if her body was spiteful. She was naked, but Brandon’s pants weren’t off yet. She was trying to focus on his arrowed hip muscles, trying to figure out if she was supposed to take his cock out for him, when he put two fingers inside her and it just happened. She wasn’t expecting it so she couldn’t silence it, and her cheeks burned when Brandon laughed.

The second time was more like giving up. She was exhausted from all the times Brandon had stopped and started, tired of the taste of herself on him. She suspected he wouldn’t let go of himself until she came again. She closed her eyes and imagined her virile college anthropology professor on top of her, a frequent strategy; imagined her favorite NPR host even though she only knew his voice; imagined another woman on top of her, tits flattened against hers; imagined David sitting in the corner of the room watching and touching himself, wanting in.

Fuck him. How could he think this would help anything? How could she let herself be traded?

 Finally she held Brandon’s hips in place until she accomplished it, then he did, too, then it was time to go home.

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