“The stone thrower doesn’t love the mistress but he needs the moments they share, those moments when he does not have to see too much or love to carefully.”
‘The stone thrower’ is the prodigy of deviousness. He goes to the mistress for romantic moments even though he has a wife. What is more, he gives the mistress the notion that he adores her, through the ways he touches her, yet he is only fascinated with the sensations that his ‘glass wife’ cannot give;accordingly, the ‘stone thrower’ is egotistical.
“She warms to his touch, just slightly, and though he can’t see it, he can feel how her body responds, her obdurate glass nipples grow even harder to his touch, how inside she is slick and tight.”
‘The glass wife’ does not repose when her husband makes love to her. She is full of tension, hence she cannot warm passionately. Therefore, even sex cannot foreshorten the emotional aloofness between the ‘stone thrower’ and the ‘glass wife’. If she were in love her body would have loosened up during the passionate moment. The glass wife does not devote her passion in the relationship with her husband making it grueling to delight in the ecstasy of marriage.
“As the doctor glides the sonogram wand across the lower round of my belly, she turns a knob on the machine. "Do you hear that?" she asks. The room is silent but for the identical flutters of two heartbeats.”
This passage marks the end of the “The Mark of Cain” and it leaves the reader in a quandary. Possibly, the “identical flutters of the heartbeats” which, possibly emanate from the sonogram mean that the narrator could be pregnant with twins. The resolution leaves the reader with the questions: How will the narrator ascertain who between Jacob and Caleb is the father of her babies? And could it be Biologically plausible that both Jacob and Caleb contributed to the twin pregnancies? The dilemma is the resolution epitomizes the predicaments that self-denying women find themselves in, when they plunge in self-deception for long.
“Jacob takes me home while Caleb takes Cassie to Jacob's house, five houses down from ours. In the middle of the night, they will switch places and I will know because Caleb will smell like another woman. Cassie won't notice because she is the kind of woman who doesn't pay attention to details or who chooses not to pay attention to details.”
According to this quote, Caleb does not show consideration his marriage with the narrator, ,and Jacob does not have a high regard of his affair with Cassie. For them, women are miniatures that can be swap over at their will, and marriage/ love affairs are pastimes that do not require emotional outlays. Furthermore, this quote delineates the dissimilarity between Cassie and the narrator. Cassie’s obliviousness about the trickery reflects that of women who are two-timed without their awareness. Comparatively, the narrator signifies those women who are conscious on their husbands’ cheating but are unmindful.
“Then he smiles at his brother and his brother smiles back. This is when they are at their best—when they are together, sharing the same moment. There is safety, for them, in the number two.”
This quote refers to the instant when Caleb, Jacob, Cassie and the narrator are having dinner together. The “number two” is essential for Caleb and Jacob as it stimuluses their self-concepts. They display a dual self-concept whereby Jacob can act in the same way as Caleb and vice-versa. In view of that, the complex, two-faced self-concept prompts their duplicitous lives that consist of reveling in coitus with one woman without conscience.
