The wealthy patriarch
As a powerful, successful man, Benjamin Khaled serves as a viable metaphor for the patriarchy of Western, or perhaps more accurately, the patriarchy of Abrahamic societies—they are Arabs by ethnicity. In their version of life, the wife is allowed the club as a kind of profitable hobby. The man is the real support beam of the family, and she uses his wealth and then begrudges him for it. There are broken aspects of Benjamin, to be sure, but Fontaine clearly demonstrates an unhealthy approach to dealing with patriarchy.
Tony as a deceiver
Fontaine isolates a weak man who is also competent. In the ways that Benjamin is overtly powerful, Tony is more sneaky and indirect. Benjamin and Tony both make business moves that "checkmate" Fontaine before she really ever even gets what she wants from them. Tony is able to trick her because she is pretending in her delusion that Tony is perfectly weak to her, and he lets her think that so he can get what he wants from her in business.
Alexandra's symbolic trick
The problem with Tony's deception is the same as Fontaine's deception: because they are so strongly motivated by emotions, they are easy to manipulate. When Tony decides to sleep with Fontaine's step-daughter to get back at her, he fails to realize that Alexandra is already onto his little plan, and she has already created a trap for him to fall in, exactly like the trap he is trying to spring on Fontaine—sexual humiliation by rejecting the other person for someone else.
The motif of jealousy
The characters in this novel who do dubious things for gain are those who suffer the most from chronic emotional issues like rejection and jealousy. When they decide that their suffering is evidence that they are especially victimized by circumstance, then they feel entitled to mistreat others, but in this novel, Fontaine, Tony, and even Benjamin himself—they all end up very unhappy for their greed and jealousy.
Dolores as a symbol
If Alexandra and Tony are playing games to humiliate people, then Dolores is the ultimate symbol of rejection, because she is young, sexy, and powerful in the ways Fontaine secretly craves most (evidenced by her sexually predatory behavior). She symbolizes the real people who are more competitive than her, so Dolores also represents Fontaine's competitive attitude in life.
