I have a confession: Like Call Girl's Hannah, I have few close female friends. Two, at the most. It's not that I think girls are all about ''eating Häagen-Dazs and watching Pretty Woman.'' I know the feminine bond is more complicated than that. Plus, I like ice cream and Julia Roberts, in that role at least. (Though I do share Hannah's dislike of Les Mis. Never got it, never will.) It's not a conscious decision, either: I don't hate girls, and I get along with them. It just ended up that way, and I've sort of gone with it all my life. But even so, I'm not sure I'm cool with whatever point yesterday's episode was trying to make about women through its ''Hannah reluctantly makes a girlfriend, then said girlfriend stabs her in the back'' story line.
Here's how it went down: Hannah was helping Ben choose wedding gear (even though he'd been acting like a dunce since finding out she was a prozzie) when she got a call from her agent/madam, Stephanie. Ashok, Hannah's favorite regular and first client ever (whom you may remember from the all-nighter episode) wanted to spice things up with a threesome. (Hey, he's paying for it.) So Stephanie set them up with a girl she'd recently nabbed from a rival agency. We should have known then that the new chick, named Naomi, had no loyalty. But the session was smashing: Hannah and Naomi did all the usual fun girly things. You know, like pick out knickers, share lube, fake simultaneous orgasms. After Ashok left, they even decided to hang out, just the two of them, and got boozed up while eating Chinese food and sharing hooker stories. (One aside: Naomi said her best present from a john was a Mini Cooper convertible. Seriously?) Anyway, in the absence of Ben, Hannah had found a new best friend who was, oddly enough, a woman: As she told us in the episode's start, ''It's not that I don't like going down on girls; it's just that I never really enjoy hanging out with them.''
Then after nearly a week and a half of Sex and the City-like friendship bliss and going to the gyno in tandem, Hannah found out from Stephanie that Naomi had stolen Ash. What a whore! So what, in the context of a possible moral, does this mean? That girls make bad buds? That they are untrustworthy? Cruel? That they're destined to stab each other in the back? Because, Lord knows, Hannah ain't no saint herself. It's hard to buy her in the victim role (even if she did cry, convincingly and a lot, when she discovered Ash was through with her). And I can't help wondering if everything Naomi wrought on her wasn't something Hannah would have done to Naomi as well. (I can easily see the old Godfather line ''It's not personal; it's business'' being her credo.)
NEXT: The secret origin of Belle
