An executive returned from a weekend getaway in the Caribbean with a touch of sunburn, a sore shoulder from too much tennis, and a story. As he tells it, he'd been involved in an extremely tense negotiation for the better part of a year. "The principals knew they needed to do this deal, but they were at each other's throats the entire time," he said. "You know who that left in the middle? Me."

This wasn't the executive's only deal, needless to say. But it was the most aggravating single project he could remember. Meetings he would set after acrimonious phone calls would be broken arbitrarily; the slightest deviation in the language or content of a working memo would set back relations for weeks, while both sides railed at each other -- and at him, too.

At some point late in the negotiations the executive got the flu, which gave him an unsettling pale color and a nagging cough. There came another of the seemingly endless hiatuses (which only served, he told me, as an excuse for the principals to once again yell at each other). When he stepped through the door at home one evening, he ranted for so long to his wife and children that they simply stopped eating and watched him.

"What are you looking at?" he snapped. One of his children answered: "I was waiting to see if you were having a heart attack." That served as a wakeup call, of sorts. But what his wife did later that week really surprised him.

"She slipped an envelope under my breakfast plate on Friday morning," he recounted. In it was a plane ticket and reservations at a hotel in Barbados. "She told me I was going to get an ulcer unless I grabbed some downtime," he said. "She convinced me that what I needed was to get away by myself, to absolutely cut myself off, and just take that downtime."

That evening he found himself on a flight to Florida, then a transfer to the Caribbean. While he did nap during the flight, he found himself fighting off the urge to get out his briefcase and work on The Deal from Hell. But he'd promised his wife not to touch anything to do with it. In fact, he hadn't brought any paperwork with him. Downtime, he'd been told, meant totally disengaging from present-day worries.

Dutifully, he did as he was told. Or tried to. But he kept having more and more pangs of remorse about the deal. Shouldn't he e-mail the principals? Wasn't he wasting a weekend that could have presented an opportunity to mend relations?

He arrived at the hotel, ate a late room-service supper, and went to bed. But he couldn't sleep: The Deal, all he could think about was The Deal. And here he didn't have any of the files! Finally he drifted off.

Obsessed with 'The Deal'

He awake to a beautiful day, and after a breakfast of fresh fruit, juice, waffles and plenty of strong coffee, changed into his swimsuit and went down to the beach with a novel and a book of crossword puzzles. By 10 o'clock he was beside himself: He couldn't read a page of the novel, he couldn't distinguish "Across" from "Down" on the crossword, and he kept pawing reflexively for his cell phone -- which he'd left back in the room, switched off.

It was at this point that he saw another person, alone like himself, on the beach. He was lying on a towel, eyes closed, with his hands clasped on his belly, puffing his cheeks out as if he were blowing up a balloon. The executive looked away, embarrassed lest he be seen spying on this eccentric behavior. He couldn't resist taking a peek a few minutes later, though. There was the same scene, except now there seemed to be a small tube between the man's lips.

Unsettled and bored, the executive went up to the hotel. He walked the rose garden, peered at the card players, and finally, growing desperate, stopped by the tennis center, where he arranged to play a game with the pro.

Two hours of exhausting, high-noon tennis later, he went for a swim in the pool. There, in a lounge chair under an umbrella, lying next to an attractive woman, was the man from the beach. While the woman leafed through a magazine, he puffed out his cheeks and made a blowing motion, silently, through the small tube between his lips.

Our man went back to his room, lay down and slept fitfully until dinner time. Although he felt a strange reluctance to go into the dining room alone, he made himself dress and go downstairs. Fighting off the urge to order a bowl of soup and a sandwich at the cafe, he sat down in the formal dining room and ordered a large and elegant meal.

Only after his salad arrived did he look over into the corner of the room and see the man and woman, also dining. For the rest of his meal, the executive couldn't help stealing glances to see if the fellow was blowing up his cheeks. His vigil was rewarded several times. Yet the woman with the man didn't seem to care, even to notice.

The following day was, if anything, worse. Our man gave up trying to read, gave up on snorkeling, and stuck to tennis. The sweaty work and blistering competition with the pro were the only things that could take his mind off the deal. But that still left hours, at the beach, beside the pool, in the lounge areas, in which to mull over what he could be doing. And everywhere he went, he either saw the man with the puffed-out cheeks or else sensed his presence.

Killing a vacation with work

Finally realizing that the entire vacation was turning into a joke, the man called his airline and arranged for an earlier flight home. He rushed to his room, packed, and was at the curb waiting for the shuttle to the airport when he heard footsteps behind him. It was the fellow, alone.

"Going to the airport?" he asked. The man nodded. "Good," said the fellow, and reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the little black tube. On the point of inserting it between his lips, he saw our man's inquisitive look and smiled. "I hope you don't mind if I do a little work on my embouchure."

"Your what?"

"My embourchure. I play jazz saxophone, back in the city. My girlfriend really wanted to take a break from her job. It was really stressing her out."

"She needed some downtime?"

"Exactly. So I packed my mouthpiece and reed and came along. I spent the whole weekend blowing just to keep my mouth in shape, because when you're a musician there's no such thing as downtime."

On the plane, the executive and the fellow decided to sit together, since they were in such close agreement on so many things. The executive passed the time making notes on what could be done to save the deal. The saxophonist blew on his mouthpiece, silently, much to the amusement of the stewardesses. And nobody mentioned downtime.