"These" were Piero della Francesca's frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy, aplace of pilgrimage, then as now, forlovers of the severe Renaissance master from Umbria.
Or maybe, she thought as she stood in the kitchen, opening and closing the dumbwaiter door with one hand, the necessary act of sacrificing one phone for another could be read as a veiled enactment of the sort of ambivalence required for alternating between lovers in the first place.