Every now and then, the perfect writer meets the perfect subject. Such is the case with Franklin Foer’s article of a doomed May-December D.C. relationship in this week’s New York Times Magazine. An excerpt from “The Worst Marriage in Georgetown,” a love story, among other things:

“From their first date, Viola and Albrecht enjoyed provoking one another. At night, they would lie in their separate beds, arguing in German. But every so often, their disagreements would escalate. In 1992, Muth was convicted of beating Drath, the beginning of a rap sheet that hardly reflects the many lesser occasions of abuse. Once when they were staying at the Plaza Hotel, he threw her clothes into the hall and locked her out of the room. ‘He has all my credit cards,’ she told Gary Ulmen on the phone, who rushed to the hotel and lent her cash to buy a train ticket back to Washington.

Where Drath nursed deep feelings ­and wrote passionately about her love for him, Muth was in the relationship for something else. He described their marriage as transactional, an example of a Washington coupling where husband and wife merge in order to aggregate their talents and social capital. When a local television reporter named Kris Van Cleave asked Muth how his marriage overcame so many obstacles, Muth replied, ‘Why does Secretary Clinton remain with President Clinton?’

Perhaps Drath should have suspected that he was gay earlier — he was actively having affairs with men. But once she came to terms with Muth’s sexual orientation, he did little to disguise it. He even briefly moved in with a boyfriend in 2002. ‘He was the boy, she was the wife,’ Muth explained in an e-mail he sent to friends. ‘You have the one for one set of reasons, the other another, the lives were fully integrated.’ They were so integrated that the boyfriend suffered the same abuse as the wife. When Muth threatened to kill him, he obtained a restraining order.

In May 2006, Drath was eating dinner on her couch while Muth sat on the other side of the room, drunk. Your daughter isn’t a lawyer, he blared to his wife, she’s a saleswoman. (In fact, she is a judge in Los Angeles.) It might have been best to let Muth rant, but Drath defended her daughter, telling Muth that he wasn’t smart enough to get into law school. According to the detectives’ report, he responded by swinging a chair at her, knocking her from the sofa and then repeatedly pounding her head against the floor. The next morning, Drath escaped to her daughter’s home and phoned 911. When the police finally arrested Muth, he left Drath behind — an exit everyone close to her hoped would be final.”