I had thought to resume my story-telling at this point, continue the strands. But something else occurs to me. This alternative beginning has another, more insidious problem which the teacher touched on: The old woman is a device.

Under the principle of narrative priority -- which ordains that the order characters are introduced in a narrative determines their relative importance to the story -- this old woman should be important, of paramount importance.

But she is not.

She acts as a foil, her actions one of a set of many possible occurrences in an office context that happen any day or every day.

If you have worked in an office you know that to go to the pantry for coffee is to invite conversation. At the least a series of hello's with your fellow office workers all of whom you've already said hello to when you entered, late, in the morning, and again an hour afterward when you went to the bathroom to relieve yourself. Colleagues pull you aside for whispered meetings in the alcoves. The company is going to be sold, Greenfield tells me. He's going to send an electronic note to me though I disabuse him of his intention: They read the notes. They listen to our voice mail. They monitor our presence in the office.

That's my office. It may be yours as well. Not so in Marilyn's. Billing matters to the partners and if she wracks up a hundred hours a week they rejoice behind their newspapers in the well-padded seats of their private clubs (a stereotype, perhaps? All of the partners are not white Anglo-Saxon. All of them are not over 60, collecting their share, leaving the work to associates like Marilyn. Celebration went on somewhere, though, and some of them did belong to clubs that still managed to exclude women from their rosters). Of course at a hundred hours a week she never leaves her office, never moves out from behind her desk, sleeps on the sofa, gives herself what has been delicately called "a French bath" in the ladies room.

We have moved away from the device of the old woman, however.

I knew an old woman. She worked in my office. She was over 80. She shrunk another inch every year and, given sufficient time, she would have vanished. Of course, given Zeno's Paradox her vanishing is a relative notion. One hopes she might die before she vanishes.

This old woman dyed her hair jet black. I wouldn't be surprised if she used shoe polish, or perhaps wore a wig, cheap, looking more like nylon strings clumped to her head than anything else.

She died because they "eliminated her position." They combined what she did with what someone else did and, presto, no need to come into the office anymore. This, after she had fallen down and broken her hip and had already been out on disability for nearly four months. With her job left undone, papers piled up, and it appeared she might not be coming back. Perhaps she would have died anyway. (Well of course at some point she would have died anyway. Perhaps she was in the process of dying sooner than if she hadn't broken her hip, developed a problem with fluid in the lungs, lapsed into coma when the renal system shut down, then died when her nephew [apparently the sole beneficiary of a substantial stock portfolio and insurance policy] ordered the doctors to take her off life-support because, "She has expressed this living will to me many times. Manny, I don't want to be a vegetable hooked up with wires and tubes.") Still, it seemed cruel on the part of management.

The woman in Marilyn's office reminds me of the woman in my office. I can relate to the situation. You can't escape these kind of people. They mean well but if you let them get going, they'll talk you into vanishing.

Marilyn, for all her on-the-job toughness, couldn't say no to this old woman. Indulged her, took her out to lunch once a month -- somewhere nice -- and paid, not declaring the item on her expense report because she thought it would have been wrong, incurring karma debt.

In the story setting, based on all the information you've either been told or shown to this point, you have no idea of the relationship between Marilyn and the old woman. Now the old woman, strictly speaking, isn't directly relevant to the story that's about to unfold; but she matters to Marilyn. She's very important to Marilyn.

So the criticism from my teacher turns out to be completely ungrounded, the old woman no device at all. She's an integral part of Marilyn's story and Marilyn's life.